Happiness is…

Nine years ago tonight, Scott and I stood under a chuppah, surrounded by the people most important to us, and were married. Here’s a not-very-good photo of that event (one of these days I’ll scan & upload some better ones…)

Happy anniversary, honey. I love you more than words can easily express. But then, I think you already know that.

Yield Curves and Thin Ice

Of the many bits of macroeconomic esoterica I studied this semester, one that particularly caught my interest was the bond yield curve. Normally, long-term bonds pay more interest than short-term ones, because you have to lock your money up longer (this is also known as the time value of money). When you plot these prices out on a chart, you generally get a nice upward curve to the line.

However, in recent months, this hasn’t been the case. The yield curve has become virtually flat. A flat yield curve means, among other things, that people believe that the economy will continue to decline.

The Big Picture goes into a great deal more detail of why this has the potential to be a problem. The piece is a bit technical but not horribly so. Here’s his bottom line:

While not every inversion leads to a recession, every recession has been preceded by an inverted yield curve.

In other words, it’s a sign that as 2006 fast approaches, the American economy is treading on very thin ice indeed. We may get through it unscathed, but getting back on course is going to be damn tricky.

Meta-Blog Post – On Blogrolls, Comments, Etc.

I try to steer clear of meta-blog posts, and doing two in a week is definitely not usual for me, but given that Fiat Lux has recently been added to a few more blogrolls around the Internet, I though it might be a good idea to explain a little bit about my own blogroll and how one gets into it.

My Blogroll / Link Policy

I use Bloglines as my primary RSS feed aggregator. What I’ve been trying recently is this: I’ve self-imposed a limit on the number of blogs in my blogroll as a way of keeping my blog-reading habit under control. Any time I add a new blog to my Bloglines list, I force myself to remove an old one.

Bloglines also happens to have a neat little feature that lets me paste a bit of JavaScript into a template and my current list gets automagically updated on my website. It’s less work for me that way, but it does have the drawback that I can’t easily do “courtesy” blogroll additions unless I break my self-imposed rule above, get funky with my Bloglines setup and/or manually maintain that list.

The exception to this plan is the list of personal weblogs written by people that I know in real life. I keep their blogs in a private folder on Bloglines and manually maintain a selected list of those here on my weblog.

In short, if you want to get into my blogroll, you have to be better / smarter / funnier / more interesting than somebody on the current list, or you have to be a friend or family member. I do read blogs that are not on my blogroll, generally by clicking through other people’s links and blogrolls, but that’s reserved for days when I have more time on my hands.

So that’s how my blogroll works. If I come up with a better way of managing things, I’ll switch to it; ultimately this is about keeping things easy, informative and fun for me. Incidentally, that’s also why I do not use Technorati tags. Writing posts is fun; messing around with tags isn’t.

And while I’m at it, here’s two other meta-blogging bits and pieces:

Comment Policy

I have a very simple comments policy. I reserve the right to remove any comment left on this site, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used. However, I do not edit comments; that seems unfair. If they do not get tossed into the bit bucket, they remain as their authors wrote them.

Advertising

At one point I had a tip jar up here; it’s not anymore. I decided that this site is a hobby, and I’m not going to ask people to subsidize my fun. If my traffic were to rise to the point where I had to pay significantly more for hosting, I might reconsider and put up some ads, but for now, this site stays ad and tip jar free.

Not Just Lawyers

ReddHead over at firedoglake has some excellent advice today. She directed it towards lawyers, but I think it’s got applicability in the wider business world as well as the political one:

You do not adequately serve your client by telling him only those things he wants to hear. Period. The most important function you can have as an attorney is to tell your client all the things he does not want to hear — for the sole reason that he must hear them in order to make a fully informed decision. To do less is to fail at your job.

Another cardinal sin is to believe that your argument is the only right one. One of the first things you learn as a litigator is that there is always another side. Always, always, always. And you must give due consideration to every side of an issue to adequately do your job.