Political moderation in these times is a vice

So the Democratic primary race is down to Bernie and Biden now. Warren dropped out yesterday and there’s been lots of speculation as to whether she’s going to endorse Sanders. Twitter is a complete mess right now, and I haven’t been on any other social media. I can just imagine how toxic Facebook is at the moment.

The only thing I’m really paying attention to is the delegate race. Biden has a slight lead, but is barely a quarter of the way to securing the nomination. Last I checked, there were still enough undecided delegates in California to give him the lead, so I’m not resigned to Biden as the nominee just yet.

Sam Harris had Scott Galloway on the most recent episode of Making Sense. It was an interesting conversation. I’ve heard Galloway speak in support of his book before, but the conversation took a more political turn toward wealth inequality, what they call “class warfare within the Democratic party, billionaires, and of course, cancel culture. Galloway professes to be progressive, but disdains the Warren/Sanders economic platform.

Galloway has an interesting outlook on life, and I’m not sure I have the words to describe it succinctly. At one point, when Sam asks him whether he should use Facebook for marketing, given their role in destroying our Democracy, Galloway goes on a tirade about how Facebook is the most dangerous company on earth, calls Zuckerberg a sociopath, and then says that Harris should “absolutely” use Facebook’s advertising. He then adds that he’s happy to make money off of their stock, before calling for the government to take anti-trust action against the tech giants. He uses the breakup of Ma Bell, pointing out that after the split, each of the companies created were worth more than the original AT&T.

Galloway is full of these contradictions, and has some fascinating arguments. I’m still having trouble reconciling his acknowledgment of American socialism, namely the California university system that he benefited from, with his rejection of Sander’s policies. The interview, recorded before Bloomberg dropped out, goes into stop and frisk. Galloway talks about his support for Bloomberg, and makes some compelling arguments about why Bloomberg is well positioned to beat Trump in the fall.

During his defense of billionaires, he acknowledges most American’s wealth aspirations, and goes on to make the observation that most moderate American’s “don’t care about what happens in the African American community.” Those are the people that you have to win over to defeat Trump, he says.

I can’t recall ever listening to someone who I both agreed and disagreed with so much at the same time. It seems that Galloway has decided that the world is a certain way, and has taken a brutally pragmatic approach to life. Whether it conflicts with his personal beliefs or not, so be it. Facebook may be destroying to country, but I’ll be dammed if I ain’t going to profit from it in the meantime. He somehow expects the government to step in and do something, all while acknowledging that government has been bought and paid for by these same tech firms. I can decide whether it’s cognitive dissonance or some kind of ingenious rationality.

The conversation is very interesting, and there are couple portions that I’d like to excerpt and share if I have time. I think Galloway’s mindset, or at least his rationale, is prevalent within many political and business elite, and this conversation offers an interesting argument for a moderate candidate to run against Trump in the fall.

That said, I don’t buy into all of his argument, and still support Sanders for the nomination. I think Galloway makes some comments that actually can be used to better frame the case for Sanders. The conversation around means testing Social Security, has some very interesting points.

Galloway ultimately is saying the quiet parts out loud. He isn’t afraid to think out loud, and I think what he’s saying is important for those on the left to hear, and ultimately be able to rebut.

This metaphor of the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party as a bird bothers me. “You need both wings to fly.” Yes, but does the metaphor really hold up. I don’t think so. The entire moderate position seems predicated on attracting conservatives who are fed up with Trump, people like my dad. They preach “party unity”, but only as a way to solidify their position to the middle. They assume that radical economic policies won’t have traction with voters in red states, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. We’ll have to see how the primary plays out to know how that goes. Moderates may have coalesced around Biden, at the moment, but we’ll see how the voters turn out now that the choice is down to the two of them.

I’m going to finish with this clip that I saw this morning, between Simone Sanders and some lady that had the audacity to whitesplain Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It speaks more to why I think moderation within the Democratic party is perhaps more insidious than anything Trump is doing.

Dad blog

My kids are so different from each other. Some researchers have used birth order to describe some of these differences, but I tend to think that stress hormones during pregnancy and early childhood are more responsible. During my wife’s first pregnancy, we were living in a small, seven hundred square foot home in a lower income area of town. I lost my job several weeks before she was born, and was unemployed for three months after she came to us. In some respects, it was good to be around to help with the baby during those first couple months, but the stress of the firing didn’t help my wife relax.

Like all first-time parents, we didn’t know what we were doing. My wife worked in daycare when she was younger, and studied early childhood education when she was younger, so she has more experience dealing with kids that I do. Still, we fretted over sleeping arrangements, worried about SIDS and whether it was safe to co-sleep. My wife nursed, and the constantly re-evaluated whether to have a bassinet in the bedroom, keep the kid in her crib, or let her sleep in the bed. Her maternal instincts were often at odds with my sleep needs, and I was constantly trying to sleep train the kid.

After our daughter was old enough that we could start thinking about weaning, I ferberized our baby. This procedure, named after one Dr. Ferber, hypothesizes that the reasons young children have problems falling asleep is because they aren’t conditioned to do so on their own. Ferber’s method is to leave the child alone in their room for increasing lengths of time, five, ten, fifteen, and so on, until the child finally falls asleep on their own. I had no problem following this plan. Listening to my child cry for a few minutes in order for the promise of sweet, sweet, sleep for my wife and I was worth it. My wife, however, found it very difficult to bear.

The first night, it took me over forty-five minutes for my daughter to fall asleep, so it must have been when I set my timer for twenty minutes. After a few more nights of progressive success, our child was able to go to sleep without much fuss. Now my wife and I have differing accounts as to the ultimate success of my attempts, so whether she stayed asleep throughout the night or whether this is all a sleep-addled delusion on my part is very well up in the air.

We moved into a larger house before we decided to have our second child. The two girls are four years apart in age. I’ve been gainfully employed since our first was born, and my wife scheduled regular prenatal massages during her pregnancy. And the way we’ve handled our second daughter has been completely different that our first. First off, we were way less worried about SIDS, and my wife eventually began co-sleeping very early on, purchasing bed rails and special pillows to prevent any falls. We introduced daughter number two to solid foods very early, letting her gnaw on large pieces of vegetables long before she had teeth. And my attempts to sleep train her have been rebuffed by my wife.

I must have spent well over a year sleeping on the guest bed, giving my wife and younger daughter the master king size to themselves. My daughter had a tendency to sprawl horizontally across the mattress, pushing her feet or knees into my back. And she also wants to fall asleep with an arm or leg on top of me or her mother, and sometimes, if she finds that she’s not in contact with one of us, she’ll swing an arm across her body. I’ve gotten more than one hand across the face after coming to bed.

So she’s almost four now, and even when we get her to fall asleep after laying with her in her own bed. She always wakes up a few hours later, crying, before coming to find her mother. My oldest child has no problems falling asleep know.

All of this is just a long way of getting to the point about the differences between the these two during the rest of the day. Our oldest child is very difficult, mostly pessimistic, and very headstrong. My wife, taking the feminist perspective, says this latter quality means that she’s got leadership potential, but we both agree that she is extremely negative and unpleasant. I struggle with her behavior. My parenting style, inherited from my father, is rather authoritarian. She rebels, much as I did, and I’ve browsed books on child behavior with words like defiant and oppositional in the title.

Number two is like the sun to her sister’s moon. She usually cheery, happy, and helpful. This morning I was meditating while she was in the kitchen eating breakfast. She was having a conversation with herself and imaginary friends, singing songs, making up stories. It was all so rapid-fire, and it make me think about the so-called monkey mind that I meditate to quiet.

That’s not to say that daughter number one isn’t beautiful and fun to be around. I just wonder if we broke her somehow. I read once about childhood stresses causing changes in the amygdala, affecting behavior throughout life. It causes individuals to be very responsive to stressors and respond negatively. I would also describe it as a lack of resilience.

So she’s a challenge, as all children are. My boss has two girls who are both in their teens, and he listens to my stories and responds with a “you have no idea what you’re in for”. Perhaps not, but all I can do now is be the best dad that I can be, give my girls my love and do everything I can to make sure they have the skills to be kind to others and successful in life.

Morning pages

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, so I stayed up too late last night and drank too much under the guise of watching the results come in, but of course I had to finish the six pack and stayed up even later watching High Maintenance and woke up slightly hungover. I’ve actually got a work project to do this afternoon after class, and just remembered I’m meeting with another professor to work on my final credit. Hopefully I’ll have time to talk about the things I wrote about yesterday regarding education.

I spent a good deal more on the class notes in Overleaf, pouring over various Wikipedia pages and shaking my head at some of the academic paper around finite differences. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to do anything with regard to numerical analysis, I’m going to have to get a grip on some of this higher order math, and started watching the lectures for MIT’s course on the subject. One of their grads did an excellent Finite Difference Calculator, and he mentions the text and professor before giving the breakdown on how he expands a bunch of Taylor series equations to come up with the answers. I figured I’d go straight to the source, and enjoyed the first lecture in it so far.

The course leans heavily on MatLab, which I checked out last week. Thankfully, the university has a site license, so I get to play around with that as well. I’m not sure how much of this I’m going to complete before graduation; I suppose it makes a master’s degree all the more likely.

I continue coding the matrix classes in C++. I had to give up on using my custom vector class and went back to just using a C-style double pointer array. There was a problem with trying to initialize this within the context of the matrix itself. The problem is that in order to declare an array of class vector, the class needs a default constructor. My constructor requires a size argument, and getting it to work properly would require either some sort of template argument function that I don’t understand, or a zero size default constructor which would then have to be followed by a resize operation. The later seems like it would be a mistake from a performance perspective, and I just don’t have time to muck with all this right now.

I’ve got unit tests working, and I’m currently in the process of refactoring this generic matrix class out of my Gaussian Elimination class. Unit testing is coming along well. I’ve got override stream operators for input and output, and things are going well.

Now if I could just figure out what to do after I graduate. Where to go, rather. I’m listening to a podcast with the CEO of Twilio, talking about how they built a platform. It’s really interesting and got me thinking about all the fun stuff I’ve done with them in the past. Their API is really amazing. But two points from that pod that has struck with me. The first is how he says the business world has evolved from “buy or build” to “build or die”. Businesses are becoming software companies. I love the fact that ING is using Agile methodology for their core business. Brilliant. The second point is around “ask your developers”, sort of like “ask your doctor”, but for business problems. The conversation has got me thinking about my day job. I’d love to be able to instill some of this there, but the culture just isn’t there. I’m not sure that it’s compatible with a franchise system.

I can see this goal in my head, it’s a feeling of where I’m going to be soon, and the realization that a lot of things are going to be left behind. The business I’m in, maybe even this area. Watching the primary results roll in from Colorado and Massachusetts last night made me think that I need to take the possibility of moving more seriously.

Reimagining computer science at the university

I’ve really been enjoying this last semester at school. My life has been in a place where I can devote a lot of time to it, and since I’m only part-time, it allows me time to do some deep work and get into the flow. I’m still undecided about my plans for after graduation, but I’ve been thinking about opportunities in academia. An email last week promised a free masters program as part of a Teacher in Residency program, and I signed up for a seminar. My brain was filled with daydreams of teaching computer science courses. Turns out the program was for primary school educators, so I passed, but now, another type of opportunity has sprung up that has got me thinking.

One of the science departments sent out a request for a developer. They’re using MatLab, but they are lacking the programming skills to do some task and put out the call to hire someone to develop a GUI wrapper for them. I plan on responding later, although I’m pretty sure the pay won’t be anything to get excited about. However, it did get me thinking about the larger problem, of intra-department requests like this, and about a potential use case.

GitCoin was the first thing that immediately came to mind. GitCoin is a bounty system that allows funders to place Ethereum rewards on certain GitHub issues. Devs can claim an issue, send a pull request and get payment after the issue is closed. I did one for the TensorTrade project, and getting that reward was very exciting. I was getting paid to code!

Perhaps a similar system could be built on top of a university’s GitLab system. GitCoin has a number of repositories in their GitHub, but I’m not aware if the core site functionality is all there. Departments, having placed their source code in a repository, can create their own issues, fund them, where they’ll be placed in the bounty feed.

One of the primary benefits of GitCoin, of course, is that the payments are implemented via Ethereum. Given the UX difficulties of managing MetaMask or something similar, it may still be too early for widespread adoption of such a system, but it does open the door for some sort of university token, perhaps tied to course credits or something.

Thinking back a bit to the conversations around The Future Is Faster Than You Think, I’m reminded that one of the biggest opportunities in the next few years will be around the education system. Perhaps there’s opportunity around using GitLab as a replacement for Blackboard? For all it’s strengths, I’ve never heard anything good about it from Professors, and it’s editing system is complete garbage. My university’s computer science department currently maintains a set of class materials that exist outside of Blackboard, made up of HTML pages for each course that get cloned each semester and torn down as students rotate out. I can envision a system, where the course materials are made available via repo, cloned for each semester as GitLab pages, and students complete their course work by forking the course repo and submittting pull requests back to the central repo. Build pipelines could be used to test student code, and students would be encouraged to refine the course materials themselves, correcting typos or clarifying materials.

There is one potential downside, however. Classes that still rely on traditional testing, where the student is not given access to all information, may have some problems with this model. One of my programming courses depended on the student to submit code which would be graded by the professors unit tests, which were kept secret. I don’t have a solution to this problem exactly, but for classes where the information doesn’t need to be kept secret, this could be an awesome solution. There are already potential workarounds to this information-hiding problem, as well. Private repos, and class groups could be used to deal with these concerns. A group of projects could be used to represent various modules of a course, and forks of the master repos could be made available after quizzes or tests.

This could be a very exciting development in how computer science education operates. I have a meeting with a professor tomorrow for a special project that I’ll be helping with, and hope to introduce this idea and see if it has traction.

Academic excellence

One of the two classes that I’m currently taking, this last semester before graduation, is on “computer procedures”, but a more accurate term is “numerical analysis”. We’ve spent most of the term working on implementing matrices and performing various algorithms like Gaussian reduction and Jacobian iteration in C++. My professor, who is a few years away from retirement, spent most of his career writing C code for aero and thermodynamic implementations, doing finite difference approximations of differential linear equations.

One of the problems with the course is that there are no supplementary materials for the class. It’s all lecture. I spend a good deal of time in class asking qualifying questions, and trying to figure out what he’s doing — and why — from Wikipedia articles. He’s wondered aloud about the number of people that drop the course each semester, and I’ve told him that it probably has something to do with the lack of supporting materials for the class.

It is no doubt one of the hardest courses I’ve taken, as it builds on years of calculus, linear algebra, and several programming courses. Not for the faint of heart. The math for this particular section is hard enough, and the professor just skips over much of the background of where the equations that we’re being given. He goes straight to the provisioning of the stencils that we need to build the matrixes. This follows the model that he’s been used to, where a scientist will give him some boundary equation problems and just ask him to solve them.

For me though, I demand more of a total understanding as to what’s going on, and have been driven slightly insane trying to understand the relationship between these first and second order differentials and these matrices that we’re coming up with. Another problem that I’ve had is that his code demonstrations in class are very dirty; just one long procedural main() function that is hard to read and even harder to understand what’s going on.

To deal with this latter problem, I was able to get him to upload his code functions to a public directory, and I’ve been refactoring it, pulling out functions here and there to make it more concise. I also implemented unit tests to validate my work and make it easier to refactor. But I ran into a real big problem trying to make up work for a few days that I was out, related to LU decomposition of a matrix. Trying to find public sources to figure out exactly what form he wanted us to use turned into a bit of a nightmare.

My refactoring eventually ran up to the limits of my understanding and ability to use C++. Our professor, old pro that he is, demonstrated all of his algorithms using naked C-style double-pointer arrays, which is not for the faint of heart. I took a crack at making these naked arrays into class members, but then ran into initialization and memory errors. So, I looked elsewhere, for other libraries that could shed some light on what I was trying to do. Unfortunately, the ones that I found either relied on FORTRAN to do the dirty work, or used arcane template methods with keywords that I had never seen and did not understand.

So, I turned to the most authoritative source I could, and picked up a copy of Bjarne Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language, and started on page one of this nearly 1400-page tome by the creator of the language. I spent many sleepless hours pouring over this work last month, finally taking a break because of a deadline in another course.

We’ve spent the last few sessions in a review of sorts, preparing for a midterm that awaits us following Spring Break next week. I’ve been attempting to nail down our professor about what we should expect on the exam, and he’s been very forthcoming. Still, it’s one thing to nod my head at what he does in class and convince myself that I understand, but a recent example on partial differentials showed me that I was ill prepared.

Now I’m not sure why exactly I decided to pick up a copy of Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming. Self-punishment, I supposed. Knuth’s volumes are widely considered one of the most important tomes in modern computer science, and also as one of the most difficult and demanding works in the field. I spent several hours over the last weekend reading, or more accurately, skimming through its first chapters, trying to get a handle on the basics.

During his introduction, he noted how his LaTeX typesetting language had enabled the work to advance. Having source code up where multiple contributors could add to it, tweaking the formulas and figures in a way that had not been possible when the work was first released. It must have lodged in my brain, cause I was woken up in the middle of the night by one of the kids, and as I lay there in the space between waking and sleeping. I remembered this article by someone who does their class notes in LaTex. When I woke up, it was clear what I had to do.

So I spent most of the day copying down my class notes into Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor, going back and forth with various Wikipedia pages, trying to translate my notes and various Wikipedia articles into LaTeX. I’m really looking forward to going over it with the Professor on Wednesday. I’m hoping to put the source code up on our University’s GitLab server and setup a pipeline to compile the .tex files into PDF.

Overflow Hell at the Sanders Rally

Bernie Sanders came to town yesterday. As our state is a Super Tuesday one, he held three rallies across it. I was part of the 2016 team and had a great experience when he came by last time, and wanted to help out this time around, so I signed up for a volunteer. My wife got us an overnight babysitter, and we headed out to the event to help with the show.

I was shocked at the sheer number of people who were there to volunteer. I had expected maybe a dozen people, but it was closer to 50. The staff rattled off jobs and picked from those with their hands up, but we were in no hurry to sign up for anything. The temperature had dropped into the forties with a brisk wind, an I had underdressed, with only a sport coat, so there was no way I was working outside. After a second round of walking us around I finally raised my hand to work the overflow room.

In 2016, they had held the rally at a local sports area, and had 3000-3500 at the event, mostly all on the floor. This year’s event was held at the stadium of a local university, that seemed like it had less capacity. I was told that it had room for three thousand on the floor, and staff said they weren’t expecting to need the overflow room. They were wrong.

Volunteering at an event like this is almost like having a backstage pass at a rock concert. And dressing up like I did gave me an air of authority as well. (Being an clean cut white guy helps also…) We were told that “the Senator” would address people in the overflow room, and I figured it would be easier to get close to Bernie in the smaller room than pushing through the crowd in the main room. They had a podium setup, and a projector connected to a laptop. I wanted to make myself useful, so I tried to make sure that we would have access to a live stream in the room. The first problem is that I couldn’t find one. I communicated it to staff, and was told that “someone was going to handle it.”

The overflow room was a secondary gym, just two full size basketball courts, with a capacity of a thousand. They main room began to fill and we were called too our stations; our job was simply to count people coming in to the room. They started sending people our way and that’s when the nature of the job became clear: people were disappointed.

Getting to the event for us had been somewhat of a chore. We go there almost three hours before the start time, and there was already a line of cars to get on the university campus. I checked my map and found a lot that was in the opposite direction of the road to the building we were supposed to go to, and was able to cut ahead so we could park and walk the short distance to where we were supposed to be. We had to walk to the far side of the building, and I was fighting off the chill the for about five minutes. People who were waiting for the event, regular attendees, were outside for an hour or more.

So imagine, you’ve been stuck in traffic, waiting in line for an hour or more, freezing your ass off at 6:30 in the evening, you finally get into the rally to see your favorite presidential candidate, expecting to be among the thousands of like-minded folks, and instead, are stuck in a gymnasium with a few hundred. It must have felt like going to see your favorite arena rock band and getting the local dive bar cover band instead. People were let down.

We had been told that Sanders would speak before the overflow crowd, which seemed to temper some people, but others were straight up indignant. Several men acted like the whole thing was beneath them. Another, and older woman, caught me in the hallway, crying about the situation, asking me why they weren’t told to show up sooner, and that she was unable to stand for long, and it was cold, and so on. All I could do was listen and offer her a chair, but there was nothing I could say to make it okay for her. Looking back, I suppose I could have tried to let her through into the capacity room, but frankly, I was kind of indifferent that she hadn’t anticipated there being a huge crowd at a Sanders rally.

We had told people in the overflow that Sanders would stop in the room, but as the event started we were told that it was starting to look unlikely due to the Senator’s flight plans. By this point, the bands had finished and the warm up speakers had started, and there wasn’t a feed in the main room. Someone had put a livestream up, but the only sound was on the projector cart, which had a pair of desktop computer speakers on it. There was a PA in the room, but the board for it was on the opposite side of the room. People were getting very antsy. I was apparent that whoever’s job it had been to manage the overflow room had failed completely, and I had already brought my concerns to staff several times.

So, I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed the microphone for the room, turned it on, and held it up to the desktop speakers. It sounded like shit, but between that and the close captions on the video feed, people could actually hear the speeches. So I stood there for close to half an hour holding this mic, watching the livestream of the event going on the other side of the room, with 500 or so people who had been relegated to overflow hell.

My view from the bacck of the overflow room.

Eventually, the word from staff on the chances of Sanders coming through the room was not likely, so I handed the mic off to someone else and made my way in to the main room. I found my wife in the back. Caught the last few minutes of the Senator’s speech. He seemed tired. When he was done, I tried to bring my wife back to overflow in case he actually came through, but she wanted to leave. So off we went.

I don’t know if he made it to the overflow room.

Being a Technologist

Or, “Where’s my flying car?”

The Recode/Decode pod had this great interview with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, authors of the book The Future is Faster Than You Think. I’ve always considered myself somewhat of a futurist, and the concept of accelerating technological change has been on my mind for a long time. FutureShock might have been the first foray into the subject for me, and I followed that up with several books by Ray Kurzweil, including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near. The years have given me some skepticism that we’ll see the type of changes that Kurzweil envisions, but 2040 does seem like a long ways of from here. Given just what we’ve seen in the past couple of decades, I’m am certain that we are going to see a continuing rapid transformation.

Diamandis is a colleague of Kurweil, they both are co-founders of Singularity University, which aims to help business leaders understand the changes that are on the horizon. The confluence of new technologies are enabling things that were just not possible a decade ago: robotics, genomics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain. Having an understanding about these trends is a huge competitive advantage.

Diamandis and Kotler were both on Impact Theory as well, and the host asked them what technology they are most interested in seeing, and the answer was flying cars. They’re pretty confident that we’ll be seeing autonomous flying vehicles hit the market in the next two to four years, and it reminded me of a thesis I heard from ARK Investment’s Cathie Wood a while back. She’s betting that it will soon be cheaper, based on cost per mile, to take a flying taxi than it will be to own a vehicle. She gets into a discussion about utilization rates, how personal automobiles are in the single digits as they sit in our driveways. Autonomous cars will be more like eighty percent.

Considering this bull case for the flying car market, I did some research to see what companies were on the forefront of this tech, and, more importantly, which ones were available as publicly traded companies. I was unable to find many pure plays, as most companies making progress in the space are either startups or subdivisions of other larger companies. The list that have are all the companies I could find that are currently available on the public equities markets.

  • Ashton Martin
  • Amazon
  • Audi
  • BA
  • Borg Warner
  • Delphi
  • Airbus
  • EHang
  • Gelly
  • Hyundai
  • Lear
  • Moog
  • Porche
  • Rolls Royce
  • Toyota
  • Tesla

Besides the larger firms like Tesla, Toyota and Boeing, there are also some smaller car companies like Rolls Royce and Ashton Martin making plays in the space. Chinese car manufacturer Geely has also acquired startup Terrafugia, which seems to be a leader in the space, and has also invested in Volocopter. I also added two parts suppliers to this list, including Borg Warner and Y. The firm that I’ve chosen to dip my foot into, however, is EHang, a Chinese drone manufacturer.

This is a straight gamble play on my part, but I’m only taking a two percent stake of my portfolio, and will be averaging in daily over the next 90 days. The stock has only been trading since December, bewtteen eight and fourteen dollars.

I’m also opening a position in additive manufacturing firm XOne, based purely off the fact that they are on the ARK Invest Autonomous Tech fund, and that their current price and chart fit my personal preference as well. So starting today, I’ll be adding these two stocks to my value averaging program, along with Lending Club and MTLS, another 3D printing firm.

During the interview with Kara Swisher, Clayton M. Christensen’s name came up. Clayton, who passed away recently, is the author of The Innovators Dilemma, a book that has been mentioned by so many leaders over the years. I went to the library to pick up a copy, but found that I had unintentionally picked up a copy of the sequel, The Innovators Solution. Thankfully, copies of the former are easily found online, so I downloaded a copy to my iPad and started reading it last night. Once I finish these two, I plan on getting on to The Future is Faster Than You Think, after I read the two books written by x and y before that, Blank and Blank.

Bitcoin vs. Coronavirus

It’s no secret that I am a huge bitcoin bull. For all my worries about risk and capital management with my financial investments, both equities and cryptocurrencies, I have thrown caution to the wind as far as bitcoin is concerned. I’d say that roughly two thirds of my total net worth is invested in either bitcoin or GBTC right now. Most of that is held directly in BTC in a hard wallet, and the rest via GBTC in my IRA.

About two months ago I started implementing a value averaging protocol to purchase GBTC. Each Monday, I would gauge the value of my GBTC holdings against a predetermined value, one-twentieth total capital times the number of weeks, and then place a buy or sell order, depending on whether I was above or below the target. The total capital that I planned for this deployment was about a third of my entire portfolio. I had set stops on several of my larger positions to gain cash, many of which triggered during the general market dip in 2019.

For the first fifteen weeks it was straight buy orders. I calculated the price that would trigger my max sell order, and on week eighteen, during the January run up, it triggered. Then the following week, I had a sell order. The last two weeks, as the price oscilated around the $10,000 mark, I was right on target, and didn’t have to place any large orders. During these few weeks, doubt began to creep and I found myself questioning the plan.

What if this was the start of the bull run to $50,000 or higher? Why would I sell? I questioned whether to break the plan and re-enter, or go even further and allocate even more than I had planned originally. I was able to squash this FOMO, and held firm. I had taken some profits, my position was up, and I would have at least another month to buy back in, as my profit taking had decreased my cost basis below my original target.

Weekly chart over the course of value averaging. Blue arrows indicate sell orders. Overall cost basis for period is 9.77/share.

And good thing I did. Effects of the Coronavirus caused a selloff in the markets, and bitcoin has fallen with it, about fifteen percent. I’m still holding to the plan, and will wait until Monday to buy back in. Patience, patience.

Also, I continue to accumulate BTC on a weekly basis, although on a much smaller scale. I’ve written a Python script to purchase a small amount through Gemini and transfer it to my hardware wallet. I’ve got one address for myself, and one for each of my children. The script alternates between them each week, placing buy orders and sending the proceeds to each of our addresses.

I plan on sharing this script via a Git gist or something shortly. It’s part of a larger trade planning library that I’m working on, and I’ve got to triple check that I’m not disclosing anything that shouldn’t be made public. I’ll do the same with the GBTC value averaging results, but that will be more difficult to scrub.

Firms I’m thinking about applying to

A recent Medium post on 2020 IPOs got me thinking about places that I’d like to work. Part of me has no desire to go back to work for a large company, I did four years with a Fortune 500 company, and while it was good for a while, the environment became toxic and I wound up self-destructing util they fired me. I haven’t had the best track record with any jobs up until my present position, to be honest. The place I’m at now isn’t ideal, but I guess I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond, so to say.

Now while I have no desire to go work for a retailer, or an exploitative company like Instacart, if I was to go back to work at a large firm and trade my freedom for a hefty package, these are some of the ones I would be interested in.

GitLab

One of the first companies on the list was GitLab. I’ve been a fan of theirs and have been using them over GitHub for the past few months. My university has an internal instance, and I’ve been using it a lot, figuring out how to use their CI/CD pipelines. They apparently have a culture of radical transparency, and have all of their guidebooks up online. Their interview and selection critiera are there, along with job responsibilities and performance metrics. Based on the compensation calculator, it looks like even a basic support position would be a step up from where I’m at today. It seems really appealing.

Stripe

Stripe has been doing very well in the payments space. They’ve got no plans to go public, but have a crazy valuation. They’ve got a lot of remote technical opportunities that could be interesting. On the downside, they recently discontinued support for Bitcoin payments, although the CEO remains optimistic about cryptocurrency in general.

Square

Not on the IPO since they went public in 2016. (Man did I miss that one…) Another payments company with several remote positions, as well as jobs in Atlanta, Denver, and Austin. Several front-end positions that I could qualify for, even with my limited experience. And the Cash App does Bitcoin, so it seems like it may be a good fit.

Asana

I used to be an advocate for Asana, but stopped using their software in favor of Basecamp. I originally skipped over them in consideration but just took a look at their job board. Nothing remote. I have no desire to move to San Fransisco, but if I wanted to move the family to Iceland it might be worth considering. I like how they have their values listed on their job postings, as well as this Day in the Life featuring one of their engineers.

Robinhood

I’m not a customer — get IRAs already! — but have been following them for some time and respect the efforts they’re doing to make investing more accessible. Fractional shares investing is a really good idea. And they offer crypto trading as well. No remote jobs available, but Denver is starting to sound like a good place to live. Go Broncos!

TDAmeritrade

Not on the original list, but I’m adding it here after hearing Junayna Tuteja, TD’s Head of Digital Assets and DLT on the On The Brink podcast. She makes it seem like a really great place to work. A quick look at their job board, however doesn’t match anything crypto-related. There’s a couple contract positions in Omaha and New Jersey, not two places I have any interest in moving to.

I have always been a ham

I had been playing guitar for a few years, a fact which was known around my high school during my junior year. I was mildly famous at school having impersonated Ross Perot during a mock presidential debate which aired on the school’s morning video announcements, and my Wayne’s World Garth costume for Halloween was a hit as well. But it was my lead performance in Death of a Salesman that brought me to the attention of our schools drama and chorus teacher, who approached me about putting together an ensemble of guitar players to accompany the chorus during a presentation of carols during the schools winter dance, called the Holly Ball.

“After we’re done with our performances, you and the others will have a chance to do a few songs of your own,” she told me, and of course I jumped at the opportunity. Word soon got round to all my friends and we soon had more than enough players. The plan was to have several of us accompany the chorus with our acoustic guitars, then plug in and rock out for a few heavier songs. I remember there was a bit of fighting over what those songs would be, as several people, myself included, wanted to be the front man for their fave songs. In the end, I believe we settled on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Sprit, sung by a friend of mine, and also Today by Smashing Pumpkins, which was a fave of several others on the team. We chose Fire, by Jimi Hendrix, cause it was a classic that allowed several of us to show off our playing ability.

So we had several rehearsals the week or two before the show to work out the set, then we had the show. It was in the school’s cafeteria, with a small stage setup near the entrance; half of the tables had been cleared for a small dance floor. I don’t recall it being a big dance, but there were a few dozen people there in addition to my band mates and members of the chorus. I don’t remember much about that night, but I imagine that I was mostly focused getting through the choral numbers so that my boys and I could get to it.

Now I’ve never had the best stage presence when playing guitar, I tend to close my eyes, whether it’s from nervousness or concentration, but one memory that has stuck with me since that night was looking up during the guitar solo in Fire and seeing the crowd dancing. It was a brief moment of pure joy, seeing classmates losing themselves and tearing up the dancefloor while I busted out the music. Looking back at everything I did, music-wise, I think that was probably one of the greatest moments I ever had. And while it may sound sad to admit, I think it’s probably just a factor of nostalgia, childhood, and the familiarity I had with everyone involved.

I just happened to think about this memory when I was meditating earlier today, and time-traveled to that moment up on stage. I couldn’t help smiling.