Commentary: The Business of Increasingly Uncertain Times

I'm not much of a stock market watcher, but I'm aware enough of the financials to know that everything has been awash in red ink, for the past two days.

For some reason, the old trading truism "Buy the rumor, sell the fact" keeps ringing in my head, perhaps because it was the basis for my longtime friend Richard's great success as a stock Day Trader.

Evening sun

On the other hand, I find myself tempering that with the opposing view — at least of some people — that throwing darts at the stock listings page in the newspaper is more likely to make you money than carefully picking a stock portfolio.

I suppose the "REAL" truth lies somewhere between the two.

FORGET the Financial Markets!

Even when I have actually had money to invest, I have followed a simple strategy: Buy what you know and use.

Mrs. Denmarkguy and I owned stock on Coca Cola for many years because our kids drank shit-tons of Coke, and she drinks two Rockstar energy drinks every day (A Coca Cola product)... and people pretty much drink the stuff everywhere.

A "Holy" rock on the beach...

I own a small amount of STEEM because I blog here and use the venue, and Steem has a "first mover advantage" in the social blockchain space. I own a small amount of Bitcoin because BTC has the "first mover advantage," and will most likely still be here, long after all sorts of other harebrained blockchain ideas are abandoned.

I don't care to try to "predict" the next great invention... to the degree that I follow ANYthing, I follow those things at a Meta Level, and avoid the granularity.

Cryptos may well be "the future" (I truly believe that), but I have zero idea which ones will be here 10 years from now, and which will have been moved to the "Blockchain History Museum."

Zen view through the branches

What the Future Holds: Pure Guesswork!

I tend to be a "Late Adopter" of many ideas and technologies. It's mostly because I don't like change I don't like meaningless change for its own sake.

I tend to embrace new technologies wholeheartedly, once they have established that they are worthy and functionally implementable on a large scale. Until then, they are lots of fun to read about, but please save me from actually having to deal with them and their quirks.

We humans tend to be incredibly shitty at predicting the future. Perhaps the problem is that most of the time we don't actually predict, instead we project our finest versions of wishful thinking into that future... and then we get all butthurt and disappointed when it doesn't come to pass.

I just don't have the time.

Beach glass and pebbles

Time — and the Future of Work

I don't have time because with every year that pass, I spend more and more time on the process of simply earning a surviving wage.

As I observe this fact that it cost me more HOURS to maintain my basic life in 2020 than it cost me HOURS to maintain my life in 1985 — and I see the same being true of many of my peers and family — it underscores the potential reality that the next Great Change we will face will be in the how and what of what we call "work."

I look at pretty much everything I have done over the past 30 years, and all of it has been outsourced, or been made obsolete or been automated.

And so, we have to re-invent work and how we think about it. But that's a whole separate discussion, for a future post!

For now, I'm going to go back to work... and to watching the markets tumble.

Thanks for reading!

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Created at 20200225 15:41 PST
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