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The divorce rate for those 50+ is increasing, while that for younger folks is decreasing.

The article at the link suggests that what boomers actually love is marriage, particularly second and third marriages, which are much more likely to end in divorce.

I suppose divorce statistics are going to overrepresent serial divorcers. I’d probably rather track % of those who have been ever divorced. I looked for this, actually, and never found it. The publicly available stats are pretty hard to find/inadequate.

The point of the inquiry, as I see it, is to measure the change in societal norms, independent of things like income, age and number of children. The ‘average’ makeup of society has changed drastically in each of these areas over the last hundred years.

And it’s way too easy to just publish a provocative headline finding with no credible theory of causation to back it up. In my mind, sociologists have been pretty weak on the question of why. Isn’t this supposed to be science?

Why does society change? Why are we nicer to our kids? Why do crime rates fluctuate? Et Cetera.

Bueller?

So I’m joining the toastmasters public speaking club. Below are some impressions following my first meeting.

I was surprised at how much unprepared speaking there was. The breakdown is about 50/50 between prepared and extemporaneous sessions. When I think of public speaking, I typically imagine “speeches”, with cue cards and expressive keeners boring the class to sleep about volcanoes or something.

Here, the main event is the random selection portion.

Topic: your favorite season. Sally? Could you come up? 2-4 minutes.

Topic: your favorite sport and why. Aaron? Kindly take your turn.

Topic: what you think of Toastmasters. Marty?

Marty, as it happens, thought he would trash Toastmasters with his little impromptu; it was something to behold.

His basic point was that people don’t show up or participate enough and he snarked about how that gave him more opportunities to practice his own craft. Not a terrible message, really, but he used lots of words like “failure” and “shame” and “wasting your time and money” in a very aggressive manner. It was, frankly, rather unpleasant. But he was the best speaker of the night.

There are a few other quirks, too. For instance, there’s an official “grammarian” who counts peoples’ ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and, at the end of the night, stands up and lists off each presenter’s transgressions. It’s quite a list.

Most of the participants are ESL-types, which isn’t terribly surprising, but there are more women than I was expecting.

At least, with this blog, I have a lot of material that I’ve written down that I can use for speeches. That’s no accident, by the way.

This NYT article* can be summarized thus: people don’t call each other much anymore because they use email or text.

The phone, to me, is a secondary mode of communication to email. For personal use, I almost never pick up the phone and I certainly never want to.

For business use, I will make a call for the following reasons (in order of importance):

1. When I don’t want a conversation to be recorded for posterity for some reason

2. To explain something I’ve tried to write an email about before deciding it was too complicated to explain clearly in writing

3. To badger someone into responding to an email I’ve sent

4. Introductory calls. Cold calls are a subset here, but the vast majority of these calls happen following an introductory email

I also always pick up the phone at work, of course. But I’d say that 75% of the calls I have are made by me. Reverse ratio for emails, but most incoming is junk.

*P.S. Yglesias has a very funny commenter on this article:

From Arnold Kling:

There are two types of checks on power… In A.O. Hirschman’s famous terminology, voice is the use of the democratic check, while exit is the use of the market check. Exit is much more powerful.

For some reason I have an enormous affinity for the word ‘system’.

I like to caricature the world as being broken into system-based activities and status-based activities. The former being the entire world economy before, say, 1900, and the latter being 99% of the economy in, say, 100 years.

But this isn’t about economics, this is about Colin Marshall’s post that resonated with me.

…if you want to make a life of some craft, it makes sense to institute a system, a schedule — no matter how basic — as soon as possible.

The point, as I see it, is that you are never going to get good at something unless you do A LOT of it. Very Gladwellian, of course, but I like reminding myself of this. As such, I think Colin’s a bit harsh on this point:

I respect most the work of creators who, broadly speaking, do what they want to do — especially when they don’t want to do it.

Now, Colin might not agree here, but I’d say that he’s got his correlation/causation mixed up. Systematized creators tend to have better work, so he likes them better.

Anyway, all this to say that I do this blog to practice my writing and work out ideas that pop into my head. But if I really wanted to get good at this, I’d have to crank out material on a schedule.

Am I up to it? (A very Colin Marshallesque question!)

Back in 2008 I started following a blog called “Obama in Kenya”. It was a catalog of pictures of Obama paraphernalia in Kenya. Kenyans were pretty fired up.

It was neat but fell into disuse in the February, 2009 or so but I never took its RSS feed off my reader.

This morning I got a blast of posts from the blog dating back to November, 2010 which I would call… different:

Someone starting today can certainly generate more income than a few other individual who has been around for over a year. It’s strictly between you and also the one that you invite to find out about your dollars gifting activity and sharing club. Should they just like the concept, they could accept to offer you a cash gift. Direct. Individual to individual. No pyramid anywhere.*

That’s a pretty typical post in terms of comprehensibility and content and is titled (I kid you not):

tructured by having an make an effort to copy or “clone” [sic]

Obviously this site has been taken over by some pretty shady folks who have kept the url intact and spend a lot of time thinking about,  um, legal process and cash gifting?

Here’s another title (reproduced in whole with punctuation intact):

people would walk approximately

What was that? You want some content from this gem? Sure:

Plus, through the years I’ve supported many ministries and charitable organizations financially. Not just that, there are lots of instances when people would walk approximately me and hand me cash as being a gift to bless me.

Hilarious. And no deposed King of Nigeria for me to bail out? Come on!

Maybe this is a Turing test.

*I’m not going to link to this thing for fear of tee-ing off a blast of spam.

Second-hand story:

A colleague of mine was at the bar before dinner with a client and a few others. A reinsurer walks in (reinsurers sell, client buys, we’re in between) and this client, a rambunctious sort, challenges him:

“So, [blank], what do you think about BROKERS?”

“Honestly?… I think they slow things down, cost money and favor the client.”

Zing!

-=-=-=-

Let’s break it down. The third point is irrelevant: there’s no such thing as impartiality and besides, at the margin, buyers have more power than sellers in commodity businesses.  They can take their ducats elsewhere all to easily. We’re supposed to favor the client, dumbass.

The second point is (as they say) what it is.

The first, though? That’s not playing nice-nice, is it.

But even as narrowly and stupidly put as it is, it’s still not really a burn. Negotiation is a tricky business* and it isn’t obvious what helps and what doesn’t. Sometimes, slowing things down is a good thing. Most times, brokers play a role SOMEBODY has to play and, if not for brokers ready to take the blame, you’d be bitching about slow internal processes at the client for generating the data.

Our friend [blank] was probably stirring the pot, though, because he decided to completely overlook what we actually do.

We’re matchmakers. Building and servicing a network of people that buy and sell hundreds of millions of dollars of reinsurance every year takes a lifetime. It’s a weird job, for sure, but one that has withstood the ultimate test, competition from direct (ie non-broker) markets, for generations.

It’s very hard to create economic value. Very very hard. It’s also hard to identify economic value sometimes.

Luckily money talks.

*(TED has loads of good stuff on this, from a related field.)

This is a neat little story about the starup scene, and, from what I read, is fairly typical.

1. Guys move to the SF Bay area

2. Invent a product that flops

3. But their by-product flies!

4. JUST successful enough to survive (literally and professionally).

5. Now they know their stuff and get started for real.

In my head, entrepreneurship (of the young guns tech variety) is all about chucking yourself at an incredibly steep learning curve and persevering.

Minimum Requirements: Boundless motivation, comfortable with life in the bottom income quintile and enough coding skill to stay afloat. All while you learn.

Self-imposed desperation as your motivating force? How SWPL.

I can relate. But that ship has sailed for me.

I already have too much to lose!

Most often used to refer to a company’s culture, or an individual’s values.

Culture has respectable latin roots (from “to cultivate”).

Deoxyribonucleic acid? Give me a friggen break.

Pisses me off.