The Fragile Generation

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One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.

Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then "took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy's parents."

Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. "It's a safety issue," explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.

And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: "Your child's old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?" Absolutely not, the magazine averred: "Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time." After all, "you want to make sure that no one's feelings get too hurt if there's a squabble."

The principle here is simple: This generation of kids must be protected like none other. They can't use tools, they can't play on grass, and they certainly can't be expected to work through a spat with a friend.

And this, it could be argued, is why we have "safe spaces" on college campuses and millennials missing adult milestones today. We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe—and they believed us.

Safety First

We've had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There's the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there's a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

How did we come to think a generation of kids can't handle the basic challenges of growing up?

Beginning in the 1980s, American childhood changed. For a variety of reasons—including shifts in parenting norms, new academic expectations, increased regulation, technological advances, and especially a heightened fear of abduction (missing kids on milk cartons made it feel as if this exceedingly rare crime was rampant)—children largely lost the experience of having large swaths of unsupervised time to play, explore, and resolve conflicts on their own. This has left them more fragile, more easily offended, and more reliant on others. They have been taught to seek authority figures to solve their problems and shield them from discomfort, a condition sociologists call "moral dependency."

This poses a threat to the kind of open-mindedness and flexibility young people need to thrive at college and beyond. If they arrive at school or start careers unaccustomed to frustration and misunderstandings, we can expect them to be hypersensitive. And if they don't develop the resources to work through obstacles, molehills come to look like mountains.

This magnification of danger and hurt is prevalent on campus today. It no longer matters what a person intended to say, or how a reasonable listener would interpret a statement—what matters is whether any individual feels offended by it. If so, the speaker has committed a "microaggression," and the offended party's purely subjective reaction is a sufficient basis for emailing a dean or filing a complaint with the university's "bias response team." The net effect is that both professors and students today report that they are walking on eggshells. This interferes with the process of free inquiry and open debate—the active ingredients in a college education.

And if that's the case already, what of the kids still in grammar school, constantly reminded they might accidentally hurt each other with the wrong words? When today's 8-year-olds become the 18-year-olds starting college, will they still view free speech as worthy of protecting? As Daniel Shuchman, chairman of the free speech-promoting Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), puts it, "How likely are they to consider the First Amendment essential if they start learning in fifth grade that you're forbidden to say—or even think—certain things, especially at school?"

Parents, teachers, and professors are talking about the growing fragility they see. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the overprotection of children and the hypersensitivity of college students could be two sides of the same coin. By trying so hard to protect our kids, we're making them too safe to succeed.

Children on a Leash

If you're over 40, chances are good that you had scads of free time as a child—after school, on weekends, over the summer. And chances are also good that, if you were asked about it now, you'd go on and on about playing in the woods and riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Today many kids are raised like veal. Only 13 percent of them even walk to school. Many who take the bus wait at the stop with parents beside them like bodyguards. For a while, Rhode Island was considering a bill that would prohibit children from getting off the bus in the afternoon if there wasn't an adult waiting to walk them home. This would have applied until seventh grade.

As for summer frolicking, campers don't just have to take a buddy with them wherever they go, including the bathroom. Some are now required to take two—one to stay with whoever gets hurt, the other to run and get a grown-up. Walking to the john is treated like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

After school, kids no longer come home with a latchkey and roam the neighborhood. Instead, they're locked into organized, supervised activities. Youth sports are a $15 billion business that has grown by 55 percent since just 2010. Children as young as third grade are joining traveling teams—which means their parents spend a lot of time in the car, too. Or they're at tutoring. Or they're at music lessons. And if all else fails, they are in their rooms, online.

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Even if parents want to shoo their kids outside—and don't come home till dinner!—it's not as easy as it once was. Often, there are no other children around to play with. Even more dishearteningly, adults who believe it's good for young people to run some errands or play kickball down the street have to think twice about letting them, because busybodies, cops, and social workers are primed to equate "unsupervised" with "neglected and in danger."

You may remember the story of the Meitivs in Maryland, investigated twice for letting their kids, 10 and 6, walk home together from the park. Or the Debra Harrell case in South Carolina, where a mom was thrown in jail for allowing her 9-year-old to play at the sprinkler playground while she worked at McDonald's. Or the 8-year-old Ohio boy who was supposed to get on the bus to Sunday school, but snuck off to the Family Dollar store instead. His dad was arrested for child endangerment.

These examples represent a new outlook: the belief that anytime kids are doing anything on their own, they are automatically under threat. But that outlook is wrong. The crime rate in America is back down to what it was in 1963, which means that most of today's parents grew up playing outside when it was more dangerous than it is today. And it hasn't gotten safer because we're hovering over our kids. All violent crime is down, including against adults.

Danger Things

And yet it doesn't feel safer. A 2010 study found "kidnapping" to be the top parental fear, despite the fact that merely being a passenger in a car is far more dangerous. Nine kids were kidnapped and murdered by strangers in 2011, while 1,140 died in vehicles that same year. While Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes in 2011's The Better Angels of Our Nature that life in most countries is safer today than at any time in human history, the press keeps pushing paranoia. This makes stepping back feel doubly risky: There's the fear of child kidnappers and the fear of Child Protective Services.

At times, it seems like our culture is conjuring dangers out of thin air, just to have something new to worry about. Thus, the Boulder Public Library in Colorado recently forbade anyone under 12 to enter without an adult, because "children may encounter hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors, furniture, electrical equipment, or other library patrons." Ah, yes, kids and library furniture. Always a lethal combo.

Happily, the library backed off that rule, perhaps thanks to merciless mocking in the media. But saner minds don't always prevail. At Mesa Elementary School, which also happens to be in Boulder, students got a list of the items they could not bring to the science fair. These included "chemicals," "plants in soil," and "organisms (living or dead)." And we wonder why American children score so low on international tests.

But perhaps the single best example of how fantastically fearful we've become occurred when the city of Richland, Washington, got rid of all the swings on its school playgrounds. The love of swinging is probably older than humanity itself, given our arboreal origins. But as a school district spokesman explained, "Swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground."

You may think your town has avoided such overkill, but is there a merry-go-round at your local park, or a see-saw? Most likely they, too, have gone the way of lawn darts. The Consumer Product Safety Commission even warns parks of "tripping hazards, like…tree stumps and rocks," a fact unearthed (so to speak) by Philip Howard, author of 2010's Life Without Lawyers.

The problem is that kids learn by doing. Trip over a tree stump and you learn to look down. There's an old saying: Prepare your child for the path, not the path for your child. We're doing the opposite.

Ironically, there are real health dangers in not walking, or biking, or hopping over that stump. A Johns Hopkins study this summer found that the typical 19-year-old is as sedentary as a 65-year-old. The Army is worried that its recruits don't know how to skip or do somersaults.

But the cost of shielding kids from risks goes well beyond the physical, as a robust body of research has shown.

Of Trophies and Traumas

A few years ago, Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray was invited by the head of counseling services at a major university to a conference on "the decline in resilience among students." The organizer said that emergency counseling calls had doubled in the last five years. What's more, callers were seeking help coping with everyday problems, such as arguments with a roommate. Two students had dialed in because they'd found a mouse in their apartment. They also called the police, who came and set a mousetrap. And that's not to mention the sensitivity around grades. To some students, a B is the end of the world. (To some parents, too.)

Free play has little in common with the "play" we give children today. In organized activities, adults run the show. It's only when the grown-ups aren't around that the kids get to take over. Play is training for adulthood.

Part of the rise in calls could be attributed to the fact that admitting mental health issues no longer carries the stigma it once did, an undeniably positive development. But it could also be a sign, Gray realized, that failing at basic "adulting" no longer carries the stigma it once did. And that is far more troubling.

Is this outcome the apotheosis of participation-trophy culture? It's easy to scoff at a society that teaches kids that everything they do deserves applause. But more disturbing is the possibility that those trophies taught kids the opposite lesson: that they're so easily hurt, they can't handle the sad truth that they're not the best at something.

Not letting your kid climb a tree because he might fall robs him of a classic childhood experience. But being emotionally overprotective takes away something else. "We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to…experience failure and realize they can survive it," Gray has said. When Lenore's son came in eighth out of nine teams in a summer camp bowling league, he got an eighth-place trophy. The moral was clear: We don't think you can cope with the negative emotions of finishing second-to-last.

Of course, it's natural to want to see kids happy. But the real secret to happiness isn't more high fives; it's developing emotional resilience. In our mania for physical safety, coupled with our recent tendency to talk about "emotional safety," we have systematically deprived our children of the thousands of challenging—and sometimes upsetting—experiences that they need in order to learn that resiliency. And in our quest to protect them, we have stolen from children the best resilience training known to man: free play.

Play's the Thing

All mammals play. It is a drive installed by Mother Nature. Hippos do backflips in the water. Dogs fetch sticks. And gazelles run around, engaging in a game that looks an awful lot like tag.

Why would they do that? They're wasting valuable calories and exposing themselves to predators. Shouldn't they just sit quietly next to their mama gazelles, exploring the world through the magic of PBS Kids?

It must be because play is even more important to their long-term survival than simply being "safe." Gray's main body of research is on the importance of free play, and he stresses that it has little in common with the "play" we give kids today. In organized activities—Little League, for example—adults run the show. It's only when the grown-ups aren't around that the kids get to take over. Play is training for adulthood.

In free play, ideally with kids of mixed ages, the children decide what to do and how to do it. That's teamwork, literally. The little kids desperately want to be like the bigger kids, so instead of bawling when they strike out during a sandlot baseball game, they work hard to hold themselves together. This is the foundation of maturity.

The older kids, meanwhile, throw the ball more softly to the younger ones. They're learning empathy. And if someone yells, "Let's play on just one leg!"—something they couldn't do at Little League, with championships (and trophies!) on the line—the kids discover what it means to come up with and try out a different way of doing things. In Silicon Valley terms, they "pivot" and adopt a "new business model." They also learn that they, not just grown-ups, can collectively remake the rules to suit their needs. That's called participatory democracy.

Best of all, without adults intervening, the kids have to do all the problem solving for themselves, from deciding what game to play to making sure the teams are roughly equal. Then, when there's an argument, they have to resolve it themselves. That's a tough skill to learn, but the drive to continue playing motivates them to work things out. To get back to having fun, they first have to come up with a solution, so they do. This teaches them that they can disagree, hash it out, and—perhaps with some grumbling—move on.

These are the very skills that are suddenly in short supply on college campuses.

"Free play is the means by which children learn to make friends, overcome their fears, solve their own problems and generally take control of their own lives," Gray writes in 2013's Free to Learn (Basic Books). "Nothing we do, no amount of toys we buy or 'quality time' or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things that children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways."

Unstructured, unsupervised time for play is one of the most important things we have to give back to kids if we want them to be strong and happy and resilient.

Where Have All the Paperboys Gone?

It's not just that kids aren't playing much on their own. These days, they're not doing much of anything on their own. In an article in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin admits that "when my daughter was 10, my husband and I suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult."

In earlier generations, this would have seemed a bizarre and wildly overprotective upbringing. Society had certain age-related milestones that most people agreed on. Kids might be trusted to walk to school by first grade. They might get a latchkey at 8, take on a newspaper route around 10, start babysitting at 12. But over the past generation or so, those milestones disappeared—buried by fears of kidnapping, the rise of supervised activities, and the pre-eminence of homework. Parents today know all about the academic milestones their kids are supposed to reach, but not about the moments when kids used to start joining the world.

It's not necessarily their fault. Calls to eight newspapers in North Carolina found none that would take anyone under the age of 18 to deliver papers. A police chief in New Albany, Ohio, went on record saying kids shouldn't be outside on their own till age 16, "the threshold where you see children getting a little bit more freedom." A study in Britain found that while just under half of all 16- to 17-year-olds had jobs as recently as 1992, today that number is 20 percent.

The responsibility expected of kids not so long ago has become almost inconceivable. Published in 1979, the book Your 6-Year-old: Loving and Defiant includes a simple checklist for what a child entering first grade should be able to do: Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored? Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels? Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to a store, school, playground, or friend's home?

Hang on. Walk to the store at 6—alone?

It's tempting to blame "helicopter parents" for today's less resilient kids. But when all the first-graders are walking themselves to school, it's easy to add yours to the mix. When your child is the only one, it's harder. And that's where we are today. Norms have dramatically changed. The kind of freedom that seemed unremarkable a generation ago has become taboo, and in some cases even illegal.

A Very Hampered Halloween

In Waynesboro, Georgia, "trick or treaters" must be 12 or younger; they must be in a costume; and they must be accompanied by an adult at least 21 years of age. So if you have kids who are 15, 10, and 8, you can't send them out together. The 15-year-old is not allowed to dress up, yet she won't be considered old enough to supervise her siblings for another six years. And this is on the one night of the entire year we traditionally let children pretend to be adults.

Other schools and community centers now send letters home asking parents not to let their children wear scary costumes. Some even organize "trunk or treats"—cars parked in a circle, trunks open and filled with candy, thus saving the kids from having to walk around the neighborhood or knock on doors. (That would be tiring and terrifying.) If this is childhood, is it any wonder college kids also expect to be micromanaged on Halloween?

At Yale in 2015, after 13 college administrators signed a letter outlining appropriate vs. inappropriate costume choices for students, the childhood development expert and campus lecturer Erika Christakis suggested that it would be better to allow kids to think for themselves. After all, Halloween is supposed to be about pushing boundaries. "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little obnoxious…or, yes, offensive?" she wrote. "Have we lost faith in young people's capacity—your capacity—to ignore or reject things that trouble you?"

Apparently, yes. Angry students mobbed her husband, the professor Nicholas Christakis, surrounding him in the courtyard of the residential college where he served as master. They screamed obscenities and demanded he apologize for believing, along with his wife, that college students are in fact capable of handling offensive costumes on Halloween. "Be quiet!" a student shouted at him at one point. "As master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students!" She did not take kindly to his response that, to the contrary, he sees it as his job to create a space where students can grow intellectually.

As it turns out, Halloween is the perfect Petri dish for observing what we have done to childhood. We didn't think anything was safe enough for young people. And now we are witnessing the results.

No Fun and No Joy

When parents curtail their kids' independence, they're not just depriving the younglings of childhood fun. They are denying themselves the grown-up joy of seeing their kids do something smart, brave, or kind without parental guidance.

It's the kind of joy described by a Washington Post columnist who answered the phone one day and was shocked to find her 8-year-old son on the other end. He'd accidentally gone home when he was supposed to stay after school. Realizing she wasn't there, he decided to walk to the store a few blocks away—his first time. The mom raced over, fearing God knows what, and rushed in only to find her son happily helping the shopkeeper stock the shelves with meat. He'd had a snack and done his homework, too. It was an afternoon he'd never forget, and neither would his very proud mother.

When we don't let our kids do anything on their own, we don't get to see just how competent they can be—and isn't that, ultimately, the greatest reward of parenting? We need to make it easier for grown-ups to let go while living in a society that keeps warning them not to. And we need to make sure they won't get arrested for it.

What Is To Be Done?

By trying to keep children safe from all risks, obstacles, hurt feelings, and fears, our culture has taken away the opportunities they need to become successful adults. In treating them as fragile—emotionally, socially, and physically—society actually makes them so.

To combat this problem, we have established a new nonpartisan nonprofit, the Let Grow Foundation. Our goal is to restore resilience by overthrowing the culture of overprotection. We teamed up with Gray, the professor whose research we highlighted above, and FIRE's Shuchman, a New York investment fund manager who is now our chairman.

We are building an organization that seeks to change the social norms, policies, and laws that pressure and intimidate parents, schools, and towns into coddling their kids. We will research the effects of excessive caution, study the link between independence and success, and launch projects to give kids back some free time and free play. Most of all, the Let Grow Foundation will reject the assumption of fragility and promote intellectual, physical, and emotional resilience.

Children know that their parents had more freedom to roam than they do, and more unscheduled time to read or tinker or explore. They also realize that older generations were trusted to roll with some punches, at school and beyond. We hope kids today will start demanding that same independence and respect for themselves. It's their freedom that has been chiseled away, after all.

We want them to insist on their right to engage not just with the physical world, but also with the world of ideas. We want them to hear, read, and voice opinions that go against the grain. We want them to be insulted by the assumption that they and their classmates are so easily hurt that arguments must stop before they start. To this end, we hope to encourage their skepticism about the programs and policies that are ostensibly there to "protect" them from discomfort.

If this effort is successful, we'll soon see kids outside again. Common setbacks will be considered "resilience moments" rather than traumas. Children will read widely, express themselves freely, and work through disagreements without automatically calling on authority figures to solve their problems for them. The more adults step back, the more we believe kids will step up, growing brave in the face of risk and just plain happy in their independence.

Children today are safer and smarter than this culture gives them credit for. They deserve the freedom we had. The country's future prosperity and freedom depend on it.



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Get to Know Your iPhone X With This Handy User Manual

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Photo by Dennis Jarvis.

Okay, so you just threw down a cool $1K for a new iPhone X. It’s gorgeous, it’s filled with nifty advanced tech, and—you have no idea how to use it. This will help.

The iPhone X user manual in the linked tweet above is from Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal, and covers all sorts of useful tips Apple doesn’t really spell out for their customers. You’ll learn how to wake up your screen with a discreet tap, which side you use to open your notifications or Control Center, how to launch Apple Pay with two quick presses of the sleep/wake button, and even how to easily reset your iPhone X.

Once you’ve got some of the quick basics down, you can take a deeper dive with our tips and tricks guide. If you want to see a full-size version that zooms into each part of the iPhone X, check out the link below.

The iPhone X User Manual Apple Forgot | The Wall Street Journal



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Superheroes a 'cultural catastrophe', says comics guru Alan Moore [2014]

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Comics god Alan Moore has issued a comprehensive sign-off from public life after shooting down accusations that his stories feature racist characters and an excessive amount of sexual violence towards women.

The Watchmen author also used a lengthy recent interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid at Slovobooks entitled "Last Alan Moore interview?" – to expand upon his belief that today's adults' interest in superheroes is potentially "culturally catastrophic", a view originally aired in the Guardian last year.

"To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence," he wrote to Ó Méalóid. "It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times."

The award-winning Moore used the interview to address criticism over his inclusion of the Galley-Wag character –  based on Florence Upton's 1895 Golliwogg creation – in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, saying that "it was our belief that the character could be handled in such a way as to return to him the sterling qualities of Upton's creation, while stripping him of the racial connotations that had been grafted onto the Golliwog figure by those who had misappropriated and wilfully misinterpreted her work".

And he rebutted the suggestion that it was "not the place of two white men to try to 'reclaim' a character like the golliwogg", telling Ó Méalóid that this idea "would appear to be predicated upon an assumption that no author or artist should presume to use characters who are of a different race to themselves".

"Since I can think of no obvious reason why this principle should only relate to the issue of race – and specifically to black people and white people – then I assume it must be extended to characters of different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, political persuasions and, possibly most uncomfortably of all for many people considering these issues, social classes … If this restriction were universally adopted, we would have had no authors from middle-class backgrounds who were able to write about the situation of the lower classes, which would have effectively ruled out almost all authors since William Shakespeare."

Moore also defended himself against the claim that his work was characterised by "the prevalence of sexual violence towards women, with a number of instances of rape or attempted rape in [his] stories", saying that "there is a far greater prevalence of consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships in my work than there are instances of sexual violence", and that "there is clearly a lot more non-sexual violence in my work that there is violence of the sexual variety".

His thinking, he said, was that "sexual violence, including rape and domestic abuse, should also feature in my work where necessary or appropriate to a given narrative, the alternative being to imply that these things did not exist, or weren't happening. This, given the scale upon which such events occur, would have seemed tantamount to the denial of a sexual holocaust, happening annually."

In the real world there are, Moore tells his interviewer, "relatively few murders in relation to the staggering number of rapes and other crimes of sexual or gender-related violence", but this is "almost a complete reversal of the way that the world is represented in its movies, television shows, literature or comic-book material".

"Why should murder be so over-represented in our popular fiction, and crimes of a sexual nature so under-represented?" he asks. "Surely it cannot be because rape is worse than murder, and is thus deserving of a special unmentionable status. Surely, the last people to suggest that rape was worse than murder were the sensitively reared classes of the Victorian era … And yet, while it is perfectly acceptable (not to say almost mandatory) to depict violent and lethal incidents in lurid and gloating high-definition detail, this is somehow regarded as healthy and perfectly normal, and it is the considered depiction of sexual crimes that will inevitably attract uproars of the current variety."

Moore ended by telling Ó Méalóid that his lengthy responses to questions, written over Christmas, should indicate to fans that he has no intention of "doing this or anything remotely like it ever again".

"While many of you have been justifiably relaxing with your families or loved ones, I have been answering allegations about my obsession with rape, and re-answering several-year-old questions with regard to my perceived racism," he said. "If my comments or opinions are going to provoke such storms of upset, then considering that I myself am looking to severely constrain the amount of time I spend with interviews and my already very occasional appearances, it would logically be better for everyone concerned, not least myself, if I were to stop issuing those comments and opinions. Better that I let my work speak for me, which is all I've truthfully ever wanted or expected, both as a writer and as a reader of other authors' work."

After completing his current commitments, Moore said he will "more or less curtail speaking engagements and non-performance appearances".

"I suppose what I'm saying here is that as I enter the seventh decade of my life, I no longer wish that life to be a public one to the same extent that it has been," he said. "I myself will be able to get on with my work without interruption, which I think is something that I'm entitled to do after all these years, and indeed part of the length of this response might be likened to someone taking their time about unwrapping a long-postponed and very special birthday present to themselves. The truth may or may not set us free, but I'm hoping that blanket excommunication and utter indifference will go some considerable way to doing the trick."



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Global Macro 'Reality' - The Hopium Vs Doomium Model Explained

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Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities,

When Reality and Sentiment Diverge

The Hopium versus Doomium Model

We are initiating the Hopium vs. Doomium model today.  I first came across the word Hopium in the aftermath of the financial crisis.  It was typically used by ‘doomers’ who believed markets were far ahead of themselves and were betting on hope rather than reality.

This model attempts to pit what I view as reality versus what view as sentiment.  The scoring system is partly objective (technical indicating overbought or oversold, fund flows, positioning reports, etc.) and partly subjective (largely me trolling the media and social media trying to uncover true sentiment shifts).

What this is meant to do, is to identify opportunities where sentiment and reality diverge.  If sentiment and reality are roughly lined up, then there is no obvious trade to me, but when one is very different than the other, we can identify underweight or overweight opportunities (or even long vs short ideas depending on your mandate).

Macro Hopium/Doomium

VIX

Let’s start with volatility, or more specifically, the VIX index.  It briefly spiked above 13 on Wednesday as global bond selling, concerns about the next Fed Chairperson and even some pre-earnings anxiety swept through the market.  It finished the week at 9.8 which was lower than where it closed the prior Friday.  VXN, a measure of the Nasdaq volatility, also dropped significantly as the Nasdaq composite surged more than 2%.

I do believe that the biggest risk facing the market is a spike in correlation and volatility – but I don’t see that risk as very high right now.  I have VIX showing up as barely in the green – meaning it might be a buy, but it isn’t that compelling.

Reasons VIX can stay low

  • Seasonality.  With fewer trading days as we start the U.S. holiday season can often push VIX lower.  There have been instances, like the fiscal cliff and around elections, that hasn’t been the case, but anyone looking to buy VIX must take seasonality into account.
  • Expectations for Tax Reform in 2017 are low.  Anything short of killing all possibility of tax reform is likely to be largely ignored by the market.  The market does expect Tax Reform, but not until early next year.  So long as it looks like it is grinding towards that conclusion, there is little need for markets to react – keeping VIX low.  Any setback that can be framed as ‘negotiations’ will be muted.  I am not sure what will constitute derailment, but I suspect we will know it if we see it.

Surprisingly Nervous Volatility Sellers

  • No Rush to Sell VIX.  When VIX dropped into the close on Wednesday I expect to see large inflows into the short VIX ETFs and ETNs.  When VIX spiked in August, we saw extremely large inflows into those stocks.  We didn’t see anything like this, which is an indicator that the sellers of volatility are more cautious here, which as a contrarian, means there is less likelihood of a VIX spike.

SVXY Shares Outstanding Aug vs Oct

We did see a significant reduction in shares outstanding in UVXY – an ETF that is double long the VIX short term futures index.  It looks like either profit taking, or more accurately, investors happy to get out with less of a loss than they had, but nothing so dramatic to indicate volatility bulls (market bears) have given up yet.

From a technical standpoint, the VIX futures curve is relatively flat.  The 3rd VIX futures contract (January) closed at 13.35 versus the 1st VIX futures contract (November) which closed at 11.45.   That spread of 1.9 is almost exactly the average for the year between the 3rd and 1st VIX futures contract (UX3 vs UX1 are the tickers on Bloomberg).

Geopolitical Tail Risk

  • VIX has responded most violently to increased geopolitical risk.  More than any other asset class, VIX has responded when geopolitical risk has increased.  Academy Securities hosted a client conference call on October 18th (replays are available) where Major General (retired) Spider Marks analyzed the White House Chief of Staff’s assertion that the North Korea threat is ‘manageable’ and largely agreed with that assessment.  We will update you as our views on current geopolitical risk evolve, but in the meantime, for those concerned about it, the best hedges are either VIX call options of long dated European Sovereign Debt – which leads us to our next asset classes.

Bunds and Treasuries

As of the initial writing of this report, I do not know who President Trump will name as next Fed Chairperson, but like everyone else, I await that decision as it should provide some clarity.  I view that while there will be an initial price reaction to any decision, the market will quickly rule out the possibility of a major change in policy.  The reality is that the head of the Fed is virtually forced to be dovish.  If they are dovish and the economy does well – they are lauded.  If they are dovish and the economy does poorly – they can just get even more dovish.  The only thing that really hurts them, is being hawkish and the economy slowing.  Why risk that?  Draghi didn’t risk that this week!

I continue to view Treasuries as a good candidate to be underweight as my ongoing target for the 10-year treasury is 2.60% with a chance of briefly spiking above that.  The fundamentals for treasury investors are poor – improving economic data, D.C. trudging its way towards a near term deficit increasing tax plan, etc.  There seems to be more denial in the bond market than the equity market on the potential for sustained economic growth. 

I struggle with the positioning of the bond market as many surveys indicate extreme bearish positioning, yet I find relatively few bears and a disproportionate number of bulls – who are bulls because everyone else is bearish – despite my inability to find that overwhelming bearish community.

Draghi does it again – crafting every action to be as dovish as possible.

German 10 Year Bund Yields

Bunds bounced right at the 0.49% yield level again.  That is the 4th time this year that bunds have failed to rally though that level.

While it is hard to like European yields here, they are universally hated.  That puts them into the ‘yellow’ or neutral area – at least until some more of the short positions are closed post Draghi.

It is difficult to disentangle emotions from true market impact regarding what is occurring in Spain and Catalonia.  The headlines and images are awful, but it is difficult to form a direct and near-term path that impact all European markets, let alone global markets.  It needs to be watched and while the market’s muted reaction may ‘feel’ wrong, it seems correct from a trading viewpoint.

Bunds (and other high credit quality EU Sovereign Debt) can provide excellent protection from North Korean Geopolitical risk.  Any risk-off trading emanating from Korea should help sovereign debt yields, but should also strengthen the Euro versus the Yen and versus the Dollar – adding an extra kicker to those bonds.

Dollar Weakness

DXY, a dollar index has rebounded sharply since threatening to break through multi-year lows in early September.  While there is nothing that changes my view that this administration wants a weaker dollar and is capable of jawboning it down, the clear diversion between a Fed that seems intent on hiking and an ECB that figured out how to renew its dovish bias, could support the dollar.  

DXY Bounce on Support & Retakes Moving Averages

DXY broke the 100-day moving average last week as it closed at 94.9.  That puts the 200-day moving average of 96.9 as a possible target.  The model is biased towards weaker dollar, but with very limited conviction.

Domestic Stocks

After last week’s surge, both U.S. Large Cap and U.S. Small Cap stocks looked stretched.  Sentiment is clearly high for both groups by virtually any measure, but the fundamentals seem to warrant the valuations here.  If something occurs to really disrupt the Tax Reform than look for significant pullbacks as that would dramatically shift the fundamental outlook.

Credit

Boring.  Not sure that I can put a better description than boring on the overall credit market.  Individual companies and sectors are exhibiting some idiosyncratic risk, but overall, risks and rewards seem balanced.  Credit spreads are tight, but with the global economy marching along and volatility suppressed – there is little need for credit spreads to widen.  In fact, while equities are hitting all-time highs, credit spreads are still above their pre-crisis lows.

Tax Reform can create some winners and losers – especially once Washington decides what to do, if anything, about the deductibility of interest expenses.  

I will run a full Fixed Income Hopium/Doomium Report on Tuesday where we will delve deeper into the fixed income markets while drilling down into high yield, investment grade, bonds versus loans, structured credit, etc.

Oil

For much of the year, I had a range on oil of $40 to $55, but I think we could support higher oil prices here.  Sentiment does seem bullish, but may be behind the bullish case.  I have a bias towards domestic energy companies – equities and high yield bonds – as there is still an undercurrent in Washington that wants to focus on energy selfsufficiency.  Tax Reform and Decreased Regulations should help these companies, especially if it releases any pent-up demand for M&A activity (high yield bonds tend to do better than IG bonds during periods of M&A and the high yield energy bonds could do very well if we get that combination of higher prices and reduced regulation.

Gold and Bitcoin

I always have trouble with sentiment for gold and that is even more true with Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general).  How do you create a sentiment when one portion of the world sits on ‘fraud’ and another portion of the world sits on ‘greatest thing ever.’  For gold, I find I have to sort through the barbaric relic crowd and the evangelists to derive a reasonable market view of sentiment – and Bitcoin forces me to do that exercise on steroids.

I think gold is losing its luster as a hedge.  Yes, it is something many talk about and own.  In fact, there are people that I know well and respect that advocate for a 5% to 10% holding of gold – ideally in physical form.  That may make sense, but lately gold does seem to be responding less dramatically than cryptocurrencies.  Whether it is lack of portability or that it just isn’t the new kid on the block – it really doesn’t seem to perform like you would expect – it lagged both VIX and Bitcoin when the situation in Korea became more concerning back in August.

I think at some level Bitcoin is syphoning demand from Gold.  Some portion of money that used to at the margin, buy gold on geopolitical concern, now buys cryptocurrencies (the vast majority just buys long dated sovereign debt as their geopolitical risk hedge because not only has it worked lately, you get paid to hold it – part of my ongoing theme of the popularity of Risk Parity Lite).

Bitcoin is slowing attracting new users as the price attracts attention, as it demonstrated its ability to navigate China’s crackdown and it is becoming easier to own (Coinbase, I have been told by several knowledgeable people, has made it much easier to transact).  If any ETF is eventually launched, that should create yet another wave of demand as it is easier to purchase.  The purists will scream that owning it in ETF form misses the point, but the gold purists scream about physical too, and it hasn’t stopped GLD from being highly successful.

Longer term, I have no idea where Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will head – I do believe there will be more attempts from government authorities to crack down on it, but near term, I think it is gaining traction and is something that comes up in virtually every conversation I have that last more than a few minutes.
As a caveat, I want to highlight that I do live by my 3 Rules of Bitcoin and I don’t find it paradoxical that rule number 2 is that there are no rules – it just makes analyzing it more difficult.

Bottom Line

Relatively few obvious trades out there, at least as generated by this model.  I really want to see outliers and as much as I stare at this, it is currently difficult to identify outliers.

Short treasuries and short USD might be an interesting pair.

Long oil versus short gold would need some additional work, but is another possibility. 

Own some VIX calls – it hasn’t worked, and I would wait to see sentiment get a bit more extreme on the ‘volatility is dead’ side of things before entering.

As mentioned earlier, I will do full update on the fixed income and credit side of things for Tuesday and will add some additional Macro Asset classes in the coming weeks as I rebuild my models.

Short

 



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Apple's iPhone X: The First Field Report

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How do you show off the most anticipated product in years? That was my dilemma with the iPhone X. Since my unit was one of the first few released into the wild, it naturally drew a lot of curiosity when I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it a dewy-eyed glance to wake it from slumber. Yes, this is the one—the iPhone that will hasten millions of upgrades, the one that’s made you ignore the hardly-knew-ye iPhone 8, announced on the same day as this one. After expressing proper admiration for its bright screen and svelte bezels, people would ask me, “What’s it do?” and I’d have to choose something that might indicate why Apple was charging $1000 for this baby.

I could show them more of the dazzling high-resolution screen that covers just about the entire surface of the device. I could snap some photos, demonstrating how you could now use the artsy portrait mode in the selfie-friendly front camera. Or I could show how I was slowly mastering a new set of gestures that would reprogram my muscle memories previously optimized for a home button, an appurtenance strikingly missing from my glass-encased X. But what I ultimately chose was an animated piece of shit.

That’s right—Apple’s creepy update to the iconic poo emoji. The iPhone X (pronounced “ten,” not as in X-ray) includes this mildly naughty character as one of 12 possible “Animojis” in its iMessage app. When creating a text, you can choose one of these, recording your message with audio and video. The iPhone X picks up your facial expressions and voice and morphs them onto the Animoji, as if you were Ellen DeGeneres voice-tracking Dory. Though seemingly frivolous—and, at least until the novelty wears off, kind of fun—these Animojis actually draw on some of the most technologically sophisticated advances of the iPhone X, the traits that make it unique: facial recognition, exotic sensors, an advanced camera, and powerful chips that drive graphics and machine learning. (With typical bombast, Apple has bestowed pulse-quickening names on those inventions: TrueDepth camera, A11 Bionic chip, neural engine.) At the moment their apotheosis is to imbue one’s persona into the face of a robot, a chicken, an ET, a panda…or a fecal avatar. But that’s only the start.

The poo Animoji.

I’ve had this phone since last Tuesday. Apple had given me this early peek in part because I was one of the first pre-release reviewers of the original iPhone. Given that history, we all thought it would be interesting to get my impressions of what the company clearly believes is the next milestone in a journey that has pretty much altered our relationship with technology. Sure, with every single iteration of the iPhone, Apple has claimed that it’s the best one the company has ever made. But for this anniversary edition—coming at a time when critics are griping that the company had tumbled into an innovation trough— they’re pushing for something higher. Tim Cook calls the iPhone X “the future of the smartphone.”

But that first iPhone was a black swan. The challenge and delight of my first ride with it came from glimpsing how a wonderfully designed pocket computer could perform a multitude of tasks, including, if AT&T was willing, completing a phone call. That iPhone also set a bar for game-changing that no corporation could realistically hope to clear. So how could the iPhone X be more than Apple’s usual stab at topping the previous version? After all, it’s still a smartphone. That’s what I set out to ponder—and what led me to focus so intently on that rank Animoji.

There’s plenty to admire in the iPhone X straight from the unboxing. The biggest change stares you in the face: that screen, that screen. I love the larger displays of the iPhone Plus line and Android units like Google’s Pixel 2, but the phones are too frickin’ big. They are bulky in my pocket, and making calls is like holding a frying pan to your cheek. The iPhone X is a big screen in a compact form factor—Cinerama in a phone booth. Though the device itself is only slightly bigger than the standard iPhone 8, its screen is roughly the same size as that of the iPhone 8 Plus. When you take into account its “Super Retina” capabilities (another Barnum-esque name concocted by Apple’s marketers), that screen will persistently reassure buyers that emptying their wallets for an iPhone X wasn’t folly. I found the display a noticeable, and greatly pleasurable, advance over my “old” iPhone 7, whether watching The Big Sick, streaming a live football game, or simply swiping through Instagram.

Apple

Covering the entire surface of the phone with the screen has consequences. There’s no getting around the fact that some of the sensors, camera lenses, microphones and speakers need to be forward facing; Apple addresses that by lining them up on a blacked-out notch on the top of the screen—kind of the Area 51 of the new iPhone. (Conspiracy theorists note: When you take a screenshot, The Notch disappears!) It’s an aesthetic setback (what would Steve Jobs have said?), but you get used to it, like watching a play when someone with big hair is off-center in the row ahead of you—a tiny distraction in your peripheral vision that you eventually get past.

Filling the phone surface with the screen has another effect: There’s no longer room for the home button, an integral part of the iPhone interface since the start. Its sudden removal is one of those jarring deletions that Apple is famous for, and it requires some relearning. But that’s not necessarily bad: Any upgrade which doesn’t require new behavior is almost by definition not terribly dramatic. Plus, Apple hates buttons. In any case, Apple now requires us to swipe upwards to get to the home screen. That was easy enough. A little trickier is the swipe-and-stop required to get to the carousel of open apps; it took me awhile to get the hang of pressing down on one of the little cards representing an app in order to evoke a minus sign that allowed me to close it.

I knew I’d mastered the gestures when I found myself trying to use them on my iPad. Oops. My finger no longer drifts to the home button, but pathetically swipes upwards, to no avail. And now there’s that awkward moment when I expect the iPad to unlock itself when the camera looks at my face.

That’s because on the iPhone X, the Touch ID fingerprint identification is replaced with another big change, Face ID, wherein the characteristics of your face, after a few billion operations by Bionic chips and neural engines, become a physiognomic password. Does it work? Pretty much. It seems reliable at fending off intruders. I have thrust my phone into several people’s faces—though considerably fewer than the million punims that Apple says I’d have to try before a false positive—and it has not fallen for any of them. I even offered up my own head shot to the camera: no go. How it has dealt with my own real-life face is another matter. There have been times when, despite a clear view of my face, the iPhone X has ghosted me. (Apple tells me that perhaps I wasn’t making what the iPhone X considers eye contact. I wouldn’t want it to turn on every time my face was within camera range, would I?)

Eventually I devised a strategy. When waking my iPhone I think of it as De Niro’s mirror in Taxi Driver. You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here! I then see if the little lock icon on the screen has released its latch. Alternatively, a good way to see when you’ve been recognized is to notice the generic messages on the lock screen saying “you have a notification” from Facebook, Gmail, or wherever. When you and your iPhone X make that turn-on connection, those flesh out with the actual content of the message. (This feature—withholding potentially private alerts until the phone was unlocked—had previously been available as an option but now is the default.) In any case, once I got the hang of it, I found I could dial down the De Niro and get it to unlock more naturally, though I am still mystified that sometimes it goes straight to where I left off and other times asks me to swipe up. And I really liked Apple Pay with iPhone X—having to double-click on the side button and then use Face ID was a clearer way to do transactions.

The iPhone X camera also represents a major upgrade. Since I’m not a photo buff, I’ll leave it to others to determine whether the X’s camera is superior to others claiming the mobile photo crown. I can report that the photos I did snap look super sharp, and when I took a series of shots looking out of the Backchannel office window at 1 World Trade Center, the telephoto lens captured clearer images than my previous phones. And, naturally, I tried out the portrait mode in selfies—yep, they work.

Unlike the case with photography, I am an avid fan of increased battery life and thus appreciate the iPhone X’s alleged two extra hours of power between charges (compared to an iPhone 7). I had no time to assess this scientifically, but can verify that my unit powered through the usual late-afternoon low-battery doldrums and still seemed to have some juice when it came time for nighttime charging. That charging occurred on a wireless pad—though, at this point, adding another gadget to the house just to free myself of plugging in a cable seems a dubious trade-off.

After a few days with the iPhone X, I can begin to make out its themes. It’s a step towards fading the actual physical manifestation of technology into a mist where it’s just there —a phone that’s “all screen,” one that turns on simply by seeing you, one that removes the mechanics of buttons and charging cables. A decade hence, when it’s time for the iPhone 20 (XX?), we’ll already be on the road to what comes after the smartphone; the X might be a halfway point to that future. And that’s why, despite the fact that the iPhone X at present is no more than a great upgrade to the flagship device of the digital age, I can’t easily dismiss Tim Cook’s effusions that this is more than a just another iteration.

From the beta of Snapchat for iPhone X.

It’s no accident that some of the most impressive expressions of the new phone’s technology is in the realm of augmented reality, where the digital world adds layers onto the physical one. We can get a glimpse of this from those remarkable Animojis—like that scatological doppelganger that I used as a demo—as well as the first few augmented reality apps that run on the new camera inside the X, as well as the Apple ARKit for developers. (Some of these apps, the ones that don’t take advantage of the facial recognition capabilities, also work on the iPhone 8.) A game called The Machines transmogrifies your kitchen table into a battleground where superheroes cavort. An Ikea app lets you place virtual furniture in your living room. Insight Heart is a total bonkers experience that lets you zoom into the body of a virtual human and then extract and examine a huge, bloody, beating 3D heart, suspended in your living room like a fugitive from a horror movie. It’s the most Magic Leap-y thing I’ve ever seen on a phone. And a beta of a new Snapchat feature uses Face ID technology to scarily layer masks and floral haberdashery onto your face, making Animojis even weirder.

Though the next truly disruptive device will be something other than another slab of glass and silicon—AR glasses, anyone?—it’s possible that the iPhone X will be remembered as kicking off a new wave of apps that take us a step closer to making technology truly invisible. Built-in machine learning, facial recognition, and higher resolution cameras might unlock ideas for previously untenable applications. Persistent, reliable face authentication could open the door for personalization with apps (and probably freak out some privacy activists). Even wireless charging, which I find mostly useless now, becomes transformative when charging pads sprout on tabletops in every restaurant and surfaces in every conference room.

Remember, as cool as the original iPhone was, it didn’t really begin changing the world until Apple let third-party software developers take advantage of its innards—stuff like the camera, GPS, and other sensors. Maybe something similar, albeit not on such a grand scale, will happen with the iPhone X. Those who shell out the cash for this device will enjoy their screen and battery life today. But the real payoff of the iPhone X might come when we figure out what it can do tomorrow.



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ICOs explained like you are 5yr old

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Initial Coin Offerings — In Human Terms

Quickly understand what an ICO is and what they're good for.

An Initial Coin Offering is a new way for startups and entrepreneurs to bring products and services to life without going through the soul-sucking process of wooing VC firms in traditional capital markets, who will at best immediately own a double-digit stake in your company.

Rather than relying on traditional methods for raising capital the ICO, or Initial Coin Offering, allows teams to generate funds in the form of cryptocurrency, helping provide the runway necessary to flourish.

The advantages of an ICO are three-fold:

  • Lower investment barriers for common man
  • Eliminate waste of VCs and central banks
  • Create things of value for everyday people

There are, of course, reasons not to do an ICO. So before you try and hook into a buzzword you should probably understand their most practical uses.

Thanks to ICOs the value of cryptocurrency tokens such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC) have been skyrocketing. Cryptocurrency values have been lifting so fast it’s difficult to even grasp the wealth generated as a result.

Here’s a screenshot from the Coinbase App I showed to a Warren Buffet follower before Buffet even started talking about cryptocurrency. Not sure how anyone could have missed this graph, showing the explosive growth of ETH since ICOs started going mainstream:

Ethereum value explosion in 2017. You do the math. Ethereum value explosion in 2017. You do the math.

After speaking with a number of individuals about ICOs, both friends and strangers, the common response I hear is I don’t want to invest in something I don’t understand.

This usually leaves me chuckling at the fear of the unknown as risk takers are generally the ones who are rewarded the most. And to take a risk with cryptocurrency is such a nobrainer it would be a mistake not to put in at least something.

So here’s $10 of free bitcoin to get you started. From me to you. Because the slope you see in the graph above. You should be riding it too.

Designed by comfusion.io for your privacy.



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Vitamin B6 and B12 Supplements Appear to Cause Cancer in Men

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Energy. If you’re not taking vitamin B12, forget about having energy. As The Dr. Oz Show has recommended, “End your energy crisis with Vitamin B12.” The nice thing about sublingual pills is “you don’t need a doctor, you don’t need a prescription.”

And don’t get me started on metabolism. If you want to “supercharge your metabolism and energy levels,” Amazon can deliver you a tall bottle of B12 supplements by the end of the day. Your metabolic processes will be the envy of the neighborhood. (“Is Janice ... on something?” “Yes—B12!”)

These are the sort of vague marketing claims that have propelled the cobalt-based compounds sold as B12 into American hearts and minds and blood in ever-growing quantities. They are extrapolations from the fact that B12 deficiency causes anemia, and correcting that deficiency will alleviate symptoms of fatigue and weakness. But as the National Institutes of Health notes, “Vitamin B12 supplementation appears to have no beneficial effect on performance in the absence of a nutritional deficit.”

Nonetheless around 50 percent of people in the United States take some form of “dietary supplement” product, and among the most common are B vitamins. Worse than just a harmless waste of money, this usage could be actively dangerous. In an issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, published this week, researchers reported that taking vitamin B6 and B12 supplements in high doses (like those sold in many stores) appears to triple or almost quadruple some people’s risk of lung cancer.

This is a heavy claim about a very common substance, so it’s worth spending a minute on the methodology. Concerns about B-vitamin supplements and cancer have been percolating for years. They came up quietly in a large trial in Norway that concluded ten years ago. Starting in 1998, researchers assigned 6,837 people with heart disease to take either B vitamins or a placebo.

The researchers then watched as people died and contracted diseases in ensuing years—and the vitamin group raised concerns. In 2009, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that taking high doses of vitamin B12 along with folic acid (technically vitamin B9) was associated with greater risk of cancer and all-cause mortality.

Using more than 55 micrograms daily appeared to quadruple cancer risk.

The largest increase in cancer risk was in the lung. Still, the number of cases of lung cancer among these 6,837 Norwegians was relatively small—so the actual risk was difficult to quantify. But it was big enough to catch the attention of Theodore Brasky and Emily White, two researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. White had been overseeing a cohort study that involved more than ten times as many people as the Norwegian trial, some 77,000 people across the state of Washington. The cohort is tracking their supplement intake as we speak, and it is also being followed for cancers by the National Cancer Registry.

The Washington study was specifically designed to examine the roles of “dietary supplements”—compounds known as vitamins, minerals, and non-vitamin non-mineral compounds like ginseng—in cancer risk. This was an ideal setup to look at the relationship between B vitamins and cancer, and see if it was indeed worthy of concern. So Brasky and White, along with Chi-Ling Chen at National Taiwan University, broke down this population by B-vitamin use and looked at cancers. Unfortunately their findings were even more significant than the Norwegian trial.

Lung-cancer risk among men who took 20 milligrams of B6 daily for years was twice that of men who didn’t. Among people who smoke, the effect appeared to be synergistic, with B6 usage increasing risk threefold. The risk was even worse among smokers taking B12. Using more than 55 micrograms daily appeared to almost quadruple lung-cancer risk.

There was no apparent risk among women—which is not to say it doesn’t exist, only that it wasn’t apparent.

Why or how would B vitamins increase a person’s risk of cancer?

I asked Brasky what he thought was going on. It’s all hypothetical, and he has no clear idea bout the sex discrepancy. What he does know is that  B vitamins all contribute enzymes and coenzymes to a metabolic pathway that breaks down folate in order to make the bases that comprise DNA. The pathway also regulates the expression of genes (by creating methyl groups that can essentially turn genes on and off). When we have too little of these B vitamins, this pathway can go wrong, leading to problems like incorporation of the wrong types of bases into DNA, which can cause breaks in the strands, and, in theory, lead to cancer.

We’re best to treat vitamins more like pharmaceuticals than like panaceas to be shoveled into us.

Deficiency can also mean genes that should be inhibited are no longer inhibited, also potentially meaning cancer. Sufficiency of certain vitamins is important in cancer prevention, but avoiding excess appears to be similarly important.

Among smokers, who are already exposed to carcinogens, the effect of taking anything that impairs these cellular processes could be even more likely to lead to cancer.

The research team is quick to note that the doses of B vitamins in question are enormous. The U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance for B6 is 1.7 milligrams per day, and for B12 it’s 2.4 micrograms. The high-risk group in the study was taking around 20 times these amounts.

That could seem nonsensical, except that these are the doses for sale at healthy-seeming places like Whole Foods and GNC. Many sellers offer daily 100-milligram B6 pills. B12 is available in doses of 5,000 micrograms.

I asked Brasky if his finding means that products like these should be more closely regulated—at least to require selling more reasonable doses, or to disclose risks, as is required for pharmaceuticals. Currently, supplements are absolved from this sort of requirement, or even to prove safety or efficacy before going to market. This is dictated by a 1994 law called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

“The law was created by industry lobbying to keep the FDA away from regulation, so the industry self-regulates,” said Brasky. But he deferred and said he hoped this article wouldn’t be about regulation. “I don’t want to pick a fight with the vitamin industry for any reason.”

So that falls to me. There are legitimate and important uses for B-vitamin supplements, but the emerging evidence suggests we’re best to treat them more like pharmaceuticals than like panaceas to be shoveled into us in pursuit of energy, metabolic fortitude, “cardioprotection,” “bone wellness,” or whatever way in which we’d like to be better.

The enduring theme in health is that more doesn’t mean better. What’s healthy for one person may be unhealthy for another. The fact of a product being sold without a prescription does not mean it is exempt, or that it’s good or even harmless. Any ingested bioactive substance will come with risks and benefits.

The current law gives consumers no reason to expect that risks will be listed on the labels of these products, or that health claims are accurate. A product like a high-dose B6 and B12 supplement hits shelves, and only decades later do researchers begin to understand the long-term health effects, who might benefit from taking it, and who might be harmed.  



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The iPad Pro as main computer for programming

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In the summer of 2017, I wanted to know what it would be like to use an iPad Pro as my main computer. I found out that it can actually work, thanks to an iOS app called Blink, an SSH replacement called Mosh, iOS 11 and running stuff on a server. You can jump right to the TL;DR.

This piece is written from the perspective of a backend engineer. Visit the internet to see how an editor[1], a product manager[2] and a web & graphics designer[3] use an iPad as their main computer.

As is tradition, I will first explain myself and tell you about the why.

But why?

Anyone who's used docker for development on OSX knows that while it's a lot of fun and working fine in general, it also tends to make your laptop so hot that it's very uncomfortable to work with no pants on:

Please zoom in to see what docker does to a MacBook Pro

So I wondered... My laptop is busy enough feeding RAM to Chrome and dedicating all its CPU cycles to displaying ads on webpages with parallax scrolling and videos on auto play. Why even make that poor little thing also run Docker?

Is there another way? Of course there is! Run Docker so far away that it can't possibly fry my thighs!

But before we dive into the whole iPad as the main computer thing, let's take a step back.

My workflow

Being an old person, I pretty much spend most of my programming time in the terminal. I use zsh as a shell (although I've been interested in elvish lately), tmux for window management and neovim as an editor. I program mostly in ruby, go and node and run everything using Docker.

Apart from that, I use Inbox and Slack for communication, a web browser for my googling, dash to look up documentation, 1Password to manage my passwords and Alfred to be fast at all of that.

How I spend my days (tracked with rescuetime.com)

According to the activities report on rescuetime.com, I spend around 60 % of my time writing software and 17% communicating in one way or the other. And I'm lucky - with the exception of Alfred, all of the applications I rely on are available on iOS (more on that further down this page).

In conclusion, I guess you can say that my workflow is suited perfectly for this experiment. I'd be out of luck if I relied on a visual IDE or proprietary software as is the case when you're, say, an iOS developer.

The setup

There were a couple of problems to overcome:

  1. make my work environment portable (zsh, tmux, neovim and a lot of tooling)
  2. make a remote session feel as snappy as a local one
  3. make the remote machine as secure as the local one

This whole blog post in one simple image!!1

First, let's solve 1): make my work environment portable

Dockerize tmux & neovim

For centuries, people have been syncing their dotfiles between machines in order to make their shells and editors behave the same whether they're logged in locally or on a server. An easy way to do this is to have them in a private git repository that you keep up to date on every machine. This approach, however, only syncs configuration, though (give and take a bunch of shell and vim scripts).

In my day to day work, I also rely on a lot of tooling that needs to be synced. Off the top of my head, that's Docker, a bunch of linters, other tools like jq and ag as well as utilities like the Google Cloud Platform SDK. In this case, syncing your dotfiles just won't cut it.

The solution was easy: just bake all of that into a Docker image. When I type docker run jannis/shell, this starts a container with:

  1. zsh
  2. tmux 2.5
  3. neovim 0.2.0
  4. all my tooling

The cool thing is that with such a docker image it doesn't matter where I type docker run jannis/shell, be it on a server or on my laptop. The result is the same: I'll jump right into a wonderfully configured tmux with neovim, True Color support, italics and everything you I could wish for. Yes, I hear the young people laugh now, with their Sublimes and Atoms that can display italics out of the box. But for me this is an accomplishment, alright?

First problem solved, my work environment is completely portable now. I literally can't tell if I just launched zsh/tmux/nvim on my laptop or on a server. Well. I kind of can, because when SSH'ing while on a 4G/LTE connection, there's some noticable latency.

So let's solve 2): make a remote session feel as snappy as a local one

SSH, but without the lag

There's a fantastic piece of software called Mosh: the mobile shell:

Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.

Sounds like just what I was looking for. Not only does it remove the perceived lag, it offers a bunch of other great features that are especially useful for the very mobile use case of using an iPad as your main computer: Sessions stay intact over IP changes and disconnects.

Well that was easy - now off to the final problem 3): make the remote machine as secure as the local one.

Deploying a VPN server is easy

With the server being your main development machine, it makes sense to configure your firewall to drop any incoming connections (remember to keep the ports for SSH/mosh open). What if you're working on a web app and want to try it with the browser? The firewall won't let you in anymore!

The solution is easy: just run the hwdsl2/docker-ipsec-vpn-server docker image and you have a VPN server that you can natively connect to with OSX (and iOS). That way you - and only you - can connect to any service on your server.

So, where are we? We have detached the working environment - shell, editor, tooling - from the laptop. Everything can run locally on the laptop, like it always did. Nothing changed here.

But now we have a development environment that runs on a mainframe server, so all we need is a terminal computer to connect to it. As long as it runs Mosh, we're good.

The software

Now that we have the server side taken care of, let's see how we can turn the iPad Pro into a proper workstation. Here's my work home screen:

iPad Pro home screen with work apps

The essential app here is the wonderful Blink (or if you're on mobile: App Store Link), fifth from the left in the Dock. It's a terminal app for iOS that supports SSH and mosh, and while it's open source and can be obtained for free, I encourage you to just go ahead and buy it. While the price tag of $19.99 seems high for an app, it really is dirt cheap for such an invaluable tool.

Blink 👌 10/10 would buy again!

It has everything you could wish for: configurable themes, downloadable fonts with powerline symbols and ligatures, SSH and Mosh support, can remap Caps-Lock to escape, and the list goes on and on.

With all this talk about individual apps, let's not forget the operating system. iOS 11 does a good enough job of multitasking. You can have two windows open at the same time, either in split screen mode or with one app overlaying the main app, like a thin vertical banner. Especially when setting things up, it helps that via iOS' handoff feature you can copy paste things seamlessly between your MacBook and the iPad. That's very handy when setting up Mosh to copy your SSH keys without leaving a trace say, by using email or the notes app to get them from your MacBook to the iPad.

iPad Pro screenshot: Docker, htop, vim in Mosh and Slack via iOS 11 multitasking

The hardware

It's really weird how using the 12.9" iPad with a keyboard messes with your brain and, albeit subtly, your muscle memory. iOS and macOS slowly merge together and soon enough you'll catch yourself touching your MacBook's screen. But whatever, right? Your coworkers touch and smear your screen all day long, so why not do it yourself!

One thing that surprised me was the keyboard shortcut support on iOS. It's pretty good! Opening and closing browser tabs, jumping to the location bar, selecting text, searching with cmd+f, tabbing through the running apps and so on - it all just works. And the trusted cmd+space shortcut I use for Alfred on my computer opens Spotlight on iOS, which does a good enough job at quickly opening or switching to apps.

The keyboard itself works well, too. Especially if you're switching from a MacBook, the learning curve is super flat and typing will feel completely normal within an hour.

The 12.9" iPad Pro is pretty much what you would get if you ripped the screen off a 13" MacBook Pro. Except it's much better and contains a full computer. Even though the MacBook's retina display is a really great display, the iPad Pro's display is another big step up. I don't know if it's the Pro Motion, the True Tone or the Wide color (P3) but the iPad Pro display just looks a lot better than my 2015 MacBook Pro's.

Like, A LOT better.

The Apple Pencil is another nice addition that I might go into more detail on in another post. I expected it would just be a toy that gets boring after a few weeks tops, but it has stuck and I use it heavily every day.

The other piece of hardware that's involved is the server - in my case it's a bare metal machine with an Intel Core i7-2600 and 32GB of RAM at 30€/month, that I was using as a runner for our gitlab CD pipeline at gymhero.me.

Conclusion

Pros 🤠

  • This setup is highly portable, you don't even have to join a WiFi network
  • Battery lasts forever and the iPad runs absolutely silent
  • Screen is absolutely gorgeous, it really is
  • Doesn't fry your thighs because docker runs somewhere else
  • Apple keyboard works as well as the one on the MacBook Pro
  • Touch screen and a pencil

Cons 🤔

  • Unless you have a spare one, this setup comes with a monthly spend for a server
  • You can't work unless you have LTE or WiFi
  • It's not for people using graphical IDEs
  • You can't connect an external monitor (don't mention airplay)
  • For that matter, you can't connect any hardware

The last two really are a blocker if you are in a situation where it's iPad XOR Laptop. Probably you don't want to give up using external monitors or other funky hardware, say, the nerdiest keyboard in the world, which I terrorize my coworkers with:

This is how I control the Airbus A380 work as a typist.

Executive summary

The iPad Pro with Apple's Smart Keyboard in conjunction with a server running ZSH, tmux and neovim makes a fantastic portable development machine that leaves very little to wish for.

The comment section is over at Hacker News and you will now follow @jannis on twitter 🕺

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WTI Shrugs Despite Huge Crude Draw

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A v-shaped recovery in WTI/RBOB today (amid a dollar reversal at the EU close and chatter about a big crude draw) led prices higher into the API print (but after last week's 100% incorrect API vs DOE reversal, who knows what it means). And the rumors were true - a huge crude draw (biggest in 2 months) and the first build at Cushing in 8 weeks. However WTI prices didn't move much as product builds weighed on RBOB prices.

 

API

  • Crude -7.13mm (-3.2mm exp) - bigget draw in 2 months
  • Cushing -151k - first draw in 2 months
  • Gasoline +1.951mm (+1.05mm exp)
  • Distillates +1.644mm - biggest in 3 months

After last week's 100% wrong API data (API crude build, gas draw; DOE crude draw, gas build), who knows what will happen.

 

Early weakness (strong dollar and weak IP) rebounded after Europe closed and the dollar sold off, leaving WTI/RBOB at its highs ahead of API. The initial reaction was RBOB lower and WTI higher...



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