In a time of unrest, partisan politics, and situational anxiety … it is important to remember how much we share (as opposed to what separates us).
VisualCapitalist put together a great graphic on the top 56 values that drive human behavior. For the top 15, it also shows you where they rank based on country.
Family
Relationships
Financial Security
Belonging
Community
Personal Growth
Loyalty
Religion/Spirituality
Employment Security
Personal Responsibility
Basic Needs
Harmony
Health/Well-Being
Experiences
Respect
Each individual's ranking of the 56 (15 shown above) may be different, nevertheless, this chart helps highlight what is really important to us all.
The ranking of the values changes across cultures and nations, but family emerged as the most important value consistently, and other "connectedness" values consistently ranked high.
Humans are emotional creatures (with the ability to think) rather than thinking beings (with the ability to feel). Ultimately, we are social creatures in a social society. From a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs standpoint, security often comes first, but connection comes right after that.
It's easy to focus on our differences, but it's more important to find the common ground. That's where discussion and progress happen.
In 2016, I received this e-mail from my oldest son.
Date: Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM To: Howard Getson Subject: FYI: Security Stuff
FYI – I just got an alert that my email address and my Gmail password were available to be purchased online.
I only use that password for my email, and I have 2-factor enabled, so I'm fine. Though this is further proof that just about everything is hacked and available online.
If you don't have two-factor enabled on your accounts, you really need to do it.
Since then, security has only become a bigger issue. I wrote about the Equifax event, but there are countless examples of similar events (and yes, I mean countless).
When people think of hacking, they often think of a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack or the media representation of people breaking into your system in a heist.
In reality, the greatest weakness is people; it's you … the user. It's the user that turns off automatic patch updating. It's the user that uses thumb drives. It's the user that reuses the same passwords.
Whether it's malicious or unintentional, humans are often the biggest security weakness.
As proof, watch the first few minutes of the video below to watch a social engineer find out this man's email and gain access to his cell phone account. She locks him out of his account at the same time.
I started the video with the interesting part, so you don't have to search for it.
As for passwords … I recommend not knowing them. You can't disclose what you don't know. Consequently, I recommend a password manager like LastPass or 1Password.
Some other basic tips include:
Keep all of your software up to date (to avoid extra vulnerabilities)
Don't use public wifi if you can help it (and use a VPN if you can't)
Have a firewall on your computer and a back-up of all your important data
Never share your personal information on an e-mail or a call that you did not initiate – if they legitimately need your information, you can call them back
Don't trust strangers on the internet (no, a Nigerian Prince does not want to send you money)
How many cybersecurity measures you take comes down to two simple questions … First, how much pain and hassle are you willing to deal with to protect your data? And, second, how much pain is a hacker willing to go through to get to your data?
It doesn't make sense to put all your data in a lockbox computer that never connects to a network … nevertheless, it might be worth it to go to that extreme for pieces of your data.
Think about what the data is worth to you, or someone else, and protect it accordingly.
We've talked a lot about hyperbole in the news recently – and, unfortunately, it isn't limited to politics.
People seek things that engage and entertain. Consequently, other people's business is to provide things that engage and entertain … even if those things aren't necessarily accurate or truthful.
For example, I've seen many "silly" artificial intelligence and cybersecurity references on tv shows or the news. These are obviously "hot topics." But, shocking simplifications are used because most people aren't technical enough to understand real examples.
In AI, it's pretty easy to notice because you'll see killer robots or humans losing their jobs and being left with nothing to do.
Cybersecurity is tough for "normies" to get as well. For a laugh, check out this clip from NCIS.
On top of the gibberish, and the unrealistic imagery on what a hacking attempt would look like, do you think two people typing on the same keyboard would be effective? And, reminiscent of a "peek-a-boo" game you play with babies, unplugging the monitor won't stop a hacker (it will only hide the screen from you).
In order for our electoral process to work, voting has to happen.
For as long as I can remember, voting has been an issue – but this year turns that on its head.
If you believe the current counts, Trump is behind Biden but still has more votes than he received in 2016.
In this election, Biden tallied almost 79M votes while President Trump received 73M. In comparison, going back to 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 66M votes to President Trump's 63M votes.
This year’s election had a massive difference in voter turnout. In fact, more Americans voted in the 2020 election than in any other in more than 100 years.
To put that in context, if "Did Not Vote" had been a candidate in the 2016 Presidential Electioni, it would have won by a landslide.
In 2016, "Did Not Vote" would have received 471 electoral college votes, but in 2020, it only grabs 105 votes.
As an interesting side note, in 2016 neither candidate won a majority of the vote due to support for third-party candidates. In 2020, it seems Biden has narrowly grabbed a majority of the popular vote with 50.8%.
The numbers vary slightly from source to source, but the data for these numbers primarily comes from the United States Elections Project.
The election this year has proven that our electoral system is more complicated than most understand or care to imagine.
Despite most media sources confirming Biden's election, President Trump hasn't conceded yet and is pushing for recounts. It's a reminder that a concession speech is a norm – not a requirement. But, if that is true, what are the requirements?
To find out more, watch this video on the US process – with 5M views – from TED. Regardless of your opinion on the current state of the process, it's an informative look at the potential paths forward in this election.
Earlier in the Pandemic – in June – I had a Zoom meeting with Matthew Piepenburg of Signals Matter. Even though it was a private discussion, there was so much value in our discussion we decided to share parts of it here.
While Matt's understanding of markets is based on Macro/Value investing, we use advanced AI and quantitative methods for our approach.
As you might expect, there are a lot of differences in how we view the world, decision making, and the current market environment. Nonetheless, we share a lot of common beliefs as well.
Our talk explores a number of interesting areas and concepts. I encourage you to watch it below.
To summarize a couple of the key points, markets are not the economy, and normal market dynamics have been out the window for a long time. In addition, part of why you're seeing increased volatility and noise is that there are so many interventions and artificial inputs to our market system.
While Matt and I may approach the world with very different lenses, we both believe in "timeless wisdom".
Ask yourself, What was true yesterday, today, and will stay true tomorrow?
That is part of the reason we focus on emerging technologies and constant innovation … they remain relevant.
Something we can both agree on is that if you don't know what your edge is … you don't have one.
Hope you enjoyed the video.
Let me know what other topics you'd like to hear more about.
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