This is bleak reading

Last week I learned that Rick Pagnani has filed for a new Cat bond ETF to be traded on NYSE. Tomorrow I am giving a talk on this topic. Here are my slides:
lamfin.arizona.edu/talks/Feb_27...

My wife and I learned over 40 years ago to avoid all restaurants on Valentine's Day. It's a singularity.

Very interesting and enjoyable. The organizational history and xenophobic roots of INS are very interesting. It's odd that Perkins lost political capital from a failed impeachment. Perhaps the 2 are not causally linked.

Wisdom is kindness.

I recommend nature therapy to my sons, their spouses, students, and colleagues. Isabelle and I went up to Mt. Lemmon on Monday and to our surprise, we saw a flock of Gould's turkeys. Our natural environment is such a gift.

It also entails creating noise. (Signal jamming.)

I read The Hobbit when I was around 14 (c. 1971-2), and was enthralled. I read the trilogy immediately after it. A lifetime of devotion ensued.

An Empirical Assessment of Characteristics and Optimal Portfolios Abstract. We implement a dynamically regularized, bootstrapped two-stage out-of-sample parametric portfolio policy to evaluate characteristics’ efficacy in

academic.oup.com/raps/article...

I also thought the sign of bad thinking is when you can't spell out exactly what you're doing so that it can be replicated. Why obfuscate this?

I enjoyed it. I thought the story within the story worked well, and I liked the main character. As with most horror, the ending is a bit disappointing. But I recommend this. Well-written.

George Saunders' essay in the recent New Yorker is excellent. Americans are, by nature, problem solvers. A big problem right now seems to be our 2 party system. We should be working together to 1) identify our problems and 2) find solutions. All else seems manufactured animus.