Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1384
Four types of people who work with money and how they are all very different and we mix them up at our peril, Talk Talk, my unending setbacks trying to work with Plex. An ode to my readers' civility.
Hello, good morning. How are you? I am good. I should not be, but I am good. I had… just a phenomenally shitty day yesterday. I mean, I was in a good mood — I’m still in a good mood. But my god, the hits just kept coming. Mistakes, dumb-ass mistakes, so many dumb-ass mistakes. But also tons of stupid, stupid, utterly incompetent setbacks.
But before we get to that I will just say that I am listening to Talk Talk’s The Colour of Spring this morning and man, this album rules. Talk Talk, man. It’s like if Taylor Swift decided to start making music that sounded like Pharoah Sanders or something. What a career, what a career.
Here. Indulge me. Go to these Plex Forums for me. Click “log in.” To be clear, I don’t actually have an account, but I need one. So I figure if I click “log in,” it will invite me to register, because there’s no “sign up” button anywhere. But for the last week… well, go ahead and click it. If you successfully get a log-in page, I will give you ten dollars if you help me actually figure out why my dumb-ass, forty years using computers, thirty years on this fucking internet, cannot figure out how to log in.
In addition, there’s a download page for Plex. Here it is. On three different computers of mine, several different browsers, if I click on “Plex Media Server” and try and download it, I get an error saying it’s not working. But if I use one specific computer, off in the library, then it works. Why! I have tried every imaginable combination of cache clearing, cookie clearing, turning off of the ad blocking and privacy features, I just cannot make that stupid-ass page work. I feel like an idiot.
And then! When I finally do get the Mac software downloaded? Just infinite-reloads, won’t install. Not on two different computers, three different users, three different browsers.
Which lead me to the forums, nothing there about my problems, which lead me to their support page, which literally just says “yeah bro we don’t do support, try the forums,” and the forums, well. Yeah. Can’t sign up.
At this point I kinda think: maybe Plex is the problem?
Except no one is talking about any of my problems anywhere, everything seems to work perfectly fine for everyone else. So it obviously must be all me!
I swear they are out to get me.
Or my mind is slipping.
And given the rest of yesterday, whew. Man. I mean, I was late to almost every call? Started off strong, managed to have my first call of the day on time, but after that? Nope. Every call. Late. All pro.
And then, just the stupidest financial mistakes. Nothing at work, confined to my extracurricular activities, but my god. Just idiotic. I should not be an accountant. I’m a great finance guy, terrible accountant. Do not have the patience for journal entries and process and whatnot. Which is just terrible! I need to be better about it! I try!
And it’s interesting, because I think a lot about “the science of money,” and there’s really three different types, maybe four, of the science of money, and, comrade, they really are all very, very different:
Economics, the actual “science” (or at least earnest attempt at making a science) of money. And, of course, it’s two maybe three or four sub-sciences: micro economics, macro economics, maybe we’ll add behavioral, trade, developmental. Whatever. They study the systems, they study the big picture. I was trained as an economist. In business, being trained as an economist gives you one thing: a keen insight into the big picture and larger trends. But only some of them, not all (we’ll get to that in a moment). It can help with a new idea, a new line of business, it can help a CEO, whether through their own training or through advisors, keep a handle on the environment around them.
But it is not business! It is not on-the-ground tactics, it is not knowledge of how to run a business. I have learned this the hard way. If an economist starts a business, it’s almost always a decently solid idea with an utterly unrealistic time frame.
So, then, Business, an MBA, the “science” of business (as opposed to money) would be type two. It’s very different than Economics, it’s much more rooted in boots-on-the-ground, and even more than that: imperfections in the market. Business People love “an angle.” Economists don’t think about “an angle” at all.
It’s kinda sad when economists try and be business people (said an economist trying to be a business person his whole life) but it is just depressing when business people try and become economists, because they’re not really doing economics, they’re doing finance, which is our third type. At first blush, economics and finance seem simliar: big picture study of money. But finance is way more about imperfections in the marketplace, the acknowledgement that the idea of perfect equilibrium is a myth. 200 years and economics has almost given up on this, but not really, this outright lie is still the first thing every first year econ student learns, supply and demand perfectly matching up hahahaha god, it’s like if we taught math by starting with 2+2=5.
Finance is like economics’ evil twin, looking for the angle, playing the refs, so much playing the refs, screwing the little guy, taking and giving bribes, or whatever word they have gussied them up with at the time.
An economist will talk about what Jerome Powell and the Fed should do, a finance practitioner will study Jerome’s mood and what Lisa Cook had for breakfast. Both recognize and study the influence and effect of the Fed, but in totally different directions, for totally different reasons. Finance is building fiber optic networks for split-second timing advantage on trades. Finance is leveraged buyouts, collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages. Economists might study these things, but only at the periphery of their discipline, at least until they blow up and break the world. Again.
And then we have accounting. I’ve been good in my decades as a business person to recognize the very real differences between economics, finance and business, but I have belittled accounting. Eh, not belittled. Discounted. Ignored to my peril. And it has routinely been biting me in the ass for the last five, six years as my business career progressed. In some cases, I have an accountant and they are generally great but, as I have learned from my recent stints as the accountant, accountants are only as good as what they are given to work with from their executives, and as an executive I think I’ve been lacking in my accounting attention, and as an accountant, gawd, I am just terrible.
I mean, I’m not! It’s fine, the business and economics part of my brain says: big picture everything gets fixed, nothing really changes, things are on track. And this is true from an economics and business point of view. But the accounting view matters.
Also I think about how I am the total opposite of a SV bro and my god, their accountants must hate them. Because if I have this problem this bad, they must be absolutely impossible.
A business brain is versed enough in this through the “boring parts” of their MBA that they can muddle through. But an economist? Whew, Let me tell ya. No one ever taught economists how to work with accountants, let alone be one.
Anyway, rough fuckin day yesterday.
Let’s try again today.
Here are some nice things I have seen on youtube lately.
Last night I watched my favorite Youtube furniture restorer, Angie, give what amounted to a TED talk about painting or not painting furniture when you restore it, which evolved into a fantastic exploration on how Antiques Roadshow has warped people’s perception of antiques in general, and then evolved into an amazing illustration of the Web’s toxicity, my god the internet sucks so much. Every creator on Youtube, Insta, on any social platform, they are utterly bombarded with terrible, negative, miserable-ass messages all the time.
GMHHAY is, up till now, immune to trolls. I’m deeply thankful for that. But I worry constantly about how long it will last. I worry that one day an issue will “go viral” or something.
It does seem like the actual format of GMHHAY is fantastic protection from trolling, since they can’t be bothered to read 1,000-2,000 words a day. But it’s not clear to me yet if this is a reliable rule, and the existence, in the past, of utterly toxic comment sections of certain blogs tells me that it’s not, at the very least, utterly ironclad. It could break at any moment. I’m a frail, insecure, tired old man and I would utterly crumple in two hot seconds under the withering comment environment faced by even the most milquetoast furniture restorer Youtube creator.
I guess I’m warning you now that when and if that happens, I will start charging a dollar a year or something for GMHHAY because another pretty solid internet rule is trolls don’t pay for things. But then I will lose like half of you, and that will be sad.
Because you guys rule. Just the best. Best comment section on the internet. Give yourselves a round of applause.
I was telling Emma about my day of endless setbacks and mistakes and she very kindly said: You got up on time, you made your daughter breakfast, you got her to school on time with no troubles. All of that went really well. And it’s true, it did. Jane is being great about going to school these days, and given our monumental school refusals of last year — including our two-hour car standoff one morning — I do not take this for granted at all. I am deeply thankful for it.
For today’s media of the day, here is the guy from Dawes doing a cover of Common People and I am pretty sure that’s his and Mandy Moore’s baby wailing in the background which really adds a level of nuance to the whole affair.
Here’s to a day with, hopefully, far fewer mistakes and setbacks than yesterday. Maybe I can start by, oh, I don’t know, setting alarms for my work calls and actually making them on time, like a functioning teenager or something. Table stakes. Let’s just start there.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.