Index Futures Live Quotes

Screens tell you not what is really out there but what the government or Facebook thinks you should see. If you searched for something and it wasn’t there, how would you know it really was? To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? As we live our lives increasingly mediated through screens, when it doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist.

There will be a severe backlash against this drift from the usual suspects, but increased sharing is inevitable. There is an honest argument over what to call it, but the technologies of sharing have only begun. On my imgainary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10. There is a whole list of subjects that experts once believed we modern humans would not share—our finances, our health challenges, our sex lives, our innermost fears—but it turns out that with the right technology and the right benefits in the right conditions, we’ll share everything. How

When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist. Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse. She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.

In these uncertain days, bond funds are an especially important option for investors. Unlike stock funds, they have high predictability in at least these five ways: (1) The current yields (on longer-term issues) are an excellent—if imperfect—predictor of future returns. (2) The range of gross returns earned by bond managers clusters in an inevitably narrow range that is established by the current level of interest rates in each sector of the market. (3) The choices are wide. As the maturity date lengthens, volatility of principal increases, but volatility of income declines. (4) Whether taxable or municipal, bond fund returns are highly correlated with one another. Municipal bond funds are fine choices for investors in high tax brackets, and inflation-protected bond funds are a sound option for those who believe that much higher living costs will result from the huge federal government deficits of this era. (5) The greatest constant of all is that—given equivalent portfolio quality and maturity—lower costs mean higher returns. (Don’t forget that index bond funds—or their equivalent—carry the lowest costs of all.)

One version of Borrowed thinking is a technique I call the Different Lens. To begin, brainstorm a list of people, industries, or perspectives. Examples may include: an archaeologist, a 4-year-old, someone living 200 years in the future, Elon Musk, a Navy SEAL, a zoologist, Brad Pitt, Picasso, a professional bowling champion. The more diverse and strange, the better. Next, take a stack of index cards and write one name or role from your list on the back of each. You’re now armed for a Different Lens brainstorm session. First, clearly articulate the real-world challenge you’re facing. Perhaps it is developing a new product to combat a competitive launch. Maybe you’re looking for a way to improve closing rates throughout your sales force, attract and retain Millennial workers, or reduce error-rates in your manufacturing plant. Once the challenge has been identified, turn over one card. If the card reads “architect,” the group brainstorms how an architect would approach their real-world challenge. Once the ideas start to dwindle, flip over the next card and look at the problem through the next lens. Instead of thinking about how your competition is solving this problem, think about how Beyoncé would slay it. Before long, you and your team will see the problem in a whole new light, and by borrowing the thinking from others, you’ll gain a fresh perspective that will lead to the innovative solutions you seek.