Some Unfinished Business -- Off The Net For Awhile, Going Biking -- July 3, 2016

I'm not sure if I will get back to this or not, but the dots are interesting to connect:

• Paul Krugman's book review in recent issue of The New York Review of Books
• Elizabeth Warren
• Dodd-Frank
• hedge fund industry in turmoil
• the implosion of an $8 billion hedge fund
• May 2012 - A public pension, the New Jersey State Investment Council, commits $150 million to Visium’s healthcare fund
• July 2015 - The University of Michigan’s endowment commits $50 million to Visium
• Fall 2015- Another public pension, the State of Michigan Retirement Systems, commits $100 million to Visium
•  June 2016 - portfolio manager Sajay Valvani commits suicide

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Tough Philadelphia Commute Tuesday

One-third of light rail has been taken off-track. Fortunately it's great biking weather.

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A Note For The Granddaughters

The new Douglas MacArthur biography is out, about $28 (before tax) at B&N; $24 (free shipping) at Amazon.com. I read a MacArthur biography some years ago, at least the first part. Once the part on WWII started, I pretty much quit reading. I always find the "coming of age" or the first 25 years of a person's life the more interesting.

I'm tempted to get the new biography. I was curious what reviewers at Amazon had to say about it but never got that far. I read the author's bio:

Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of The Cave and the Light, Freedom’s Forge, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Idea of Decline in Western History, To Rule the Waves, and Gandhi & Churchill, which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall, and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee.  

One of my "top shelf" books is How the Scots Invented the Modern World. This may simply be the best book of its genre. Period. Dot. I've read it twice; parts of it more than several times.

Having said that, I'm not that interested in MacArthur. Maybe I should be. We'll see.

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By The Way

Over at one of my favorite blogs, the author is complaining about Amazon delivery times, even to the point of calling Amazon's delivery-time claims "fraudulent." I posted a comment over at the blog but did not want to start an argument so simply stated that in the DFW area, Amazon's deliveries seem to be as advertised (or better). In fact, reading the other comments, it did sound like the blogger's problems were a one-off, as they say, or an anomaly, as NASA would say.

There were a number of things he said that were wrong; in other instances, he omitted certain important differences between Amazon vs brick-and-mortar, favoring b-a-m.

His complaint was that a couple of books he ordered did not arrive before he left for a trip. The books were to be used on the trip; if he left before the books arrived, they were "useless" to him. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the books very likely arrived in the two-day window, but he left an hour or so before that window closed. In other words, reading between the lines, the "two-day window" closed in the early evening of that second day. The blogger departed in the late morning or early afternoon of that second day. For all he knows, when he returns home, the books will be on his doorstep having arrived "in two days" as advertised.

Regardless, even if the books are late by a couple of hours or a couple of days, in the military we called this "PPP" -- piss-poor planning. If something is that important we would not leave it to the  vagueries of the weather, or air traffic, or ground traffic, or a new driver, or a worker's strike, etc., to get us something we needed that badly. In this case, the books were needed so badly the writer suggests that Amazon's "delivery-time" claims may be fraudulent.

Anyway, sounds like a first-world problem.