Miscellanea

Ah, the sweet sounds of my son cutting the grass.  Great music to blog by.

The markets are reacting to a particularly bad round of economic data, best summed up by the surprisingly soft employment numbers of Friday.  That has pushed the 10-year bond up to quite high levels and means for the average Joe a drop in interest rates of almost .25% on the 30-year fixed.  We’ve been doing deals in the 6.375% range again, rates not seen since early spring.

Anyone out there ever completely overhauled a business?  Because it’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds like it would be.  There has been an endless round of business books, “strategic thinking”, business consultants, etc., and we are still only barely getting started.  Olivia, the Empress of Impressions, has made an enormous difference and makes my day every 24 hours, but she’s only one person and can’t do everything.  There will, it appears, be more hires.  Logos.  New business cards.  Possibly new lender and broker affiliations.  New website.  And a partridge ♫ in a pear tree.

Apropos of this, Jeanette and I spent a couple hours yesterday in Barnes and Noble (it’s one of our favorite dates) looking through new books and deciding if we want to buy them, which we nearly always do somewhere else.  Some of the new books out there (well, fairly new) that we looked at are Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, about which I read a scathing review a while back that soured me on reading it.  Apparently the premise is that technology makes everything seem closer together, equalizes wages and living conditions, competition, etc., and at the risk of saying duh too often, I can’t believe those little factoids escaped anyone sentient, but there are a lot of people out there.

I browsed The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, and it’s one of those books you want to read because it makes you seem really, really cool at parties.  It’s not one you want to buy, though, because it’s pretty well one and done; you’re never going to read it again.  Probably the entire book can give you some perspective on how your business ought to change to take advantage of technological and digital realities – as in, Barnes and Noble is likely doomed, because although it makes a great library, most people are going to be buying their books in the future from bookstores that carry more than 10,000 titles, i.e. Amazon.

Hit of the night is the very popular but still probably underrated Guns, Germs, and Steel from UCLA professor Jared Diamond, a history of the world as seen through the prism of inevitability.  Lots of really fascinating stuff in there, and this one is a buyer for sure.

We also looked at Pregnant for 100 Years, The Anatomy of Peace, and about fifty other titles not so memorable.  You should try it.  It’s good for the soul.