Recently in Business & Economics Category

(HT: Marginal Revolution.)

Sound Mind Investing has a concise explanation of why contrarian investing works.

Simply put, the 200-year track record of the chart says that stocks are likely to produce better returns than their historical long-term average until they "catch up" to the trend line. Maybe not this year, or next, or for the next 5-10 years even. But time after time those two lines have separated and then converged, and it's likely to happen again before too long. It could take a decade, but long-term investors have time on their side.

I recognize that this is difficult to accept for many people who look at the long-term challenges facing our economy and our country. But keep in mind that all of the problems we see are already known and factored into the stock market's current valuation. The stock market is a forward-looking discounting mechanism that has all that known bad news already baked in.

That forward-looking discounting, coupled with the tendency shown in the chart for the market to revert to the mean, causes the market to continually deliver the exact opposite of what most investors expect. That's why in hindsight, a time like 1999 and early 2000 can be a poor time to invest, despite the fact that the external conditions seem to look great. And it's also why hindsight may well show the current period to be a good time for long-term investors to invest, despite external conditions seeming to look poor.

Emphasis mine.

I just want to go on the record and say that I expect more job losses. When the media reports yet more "unexpected" job losses, the question to ask is: unexpected by whom?

SHOCKER: JOBLESS CLAIMS RISE “UNEXPECTEDLY” — AGAIN! And yet, every time it happens, it’s “unexpected.” Maybe it’s time to adjust the expectations. . . ?

But how can it be “unexpected” if it’s just due to an administrative backlog?

The jump was due to an “administrative” accumulation from late December and early January holidays, and did not reflect “economic” reasons, a Labor Department spokesman said.

Wouldn’t you know about these things piling up? I mean, the holidays come around every year, and you ought to know that if you’re doing your job and tracking data and stuff. . . .

I guess that if the Obama Administration said "yeah, we expect to lose bazillions of jobs every month for a while" there would be even more backlash against their nonsensical socialist agenda.

This piece about Obama's "Colossal Miscalculation On Health Care" by Charlie Cook contains two insightful factoids that I was not previously aware of. First, with regards to unemployment, most people know that the official unemployment numbers do not count people who have given up looking for work. One of the effects of this omission is that the unemployment rate can actually improve without the creation of new jobs if people get so discouraged that they begin giving up in droves. However, I hadn't fully grasped the counterpoint: just because new jobs are created doesn't mean the unemployment rate will go down!

A number of economists expect that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. Even if that prediction is wrong, some analysts estimate that Labor's household employment survey would have to show a net increase of 150,000 jobs a month for 48 straight months for the unemployment rate to drop to just 9 percent. ...

Even before December's negative jobs report, economist Robert Reich, who was Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote on talkingpointsmemo.com that "the chances of unemployment being 10 percent next November are overwhelmingly high." The number of newly created jobs will be offset by discouraged workers beginning to once again seek employment, Reich predicted, resulting in little change in the overall unemployment rate.

No wonder the unemployment rate is a trailing indicator of the economy!

Second, presidents never get more popular during their second year in office.

As political analyst and data-cruncher extraordinaire Rhodes Cook noted in the December issue of The Rhodes Cook Letter, no other president in the past half-century has seen his Gallup job-approval rating drop as far as Obama's has in his first year (down 21 points), and no president in that same half-century has seen his approval rating go up, even as much as 1 point, between the end of his first year and the eve of his first midterm election.

I think Obama and the Democrats are in trouble.

Startling (to me) new evidence demonstrates that the government and the financial industry colluded together against American taxpayers.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

I'm a die-hard capitalist, but this sort of collusion is not capitalistic and completely undermines the ideals of the a free market economy -- both in perception and in reality. In order for a free market to function successfully, every participant must have access to accurate information and no one can be allowed to secretly benefit from government intervention on their behalf. Everyone involved in this atrocity should be tarred, feathered, and exiled to North Korea, where the economic society may be more to their liking.

(HT: MM.)

So you think International Community isn't doing enough to police the seas and prevent piracy? Then put your booty where your mouth is and buy shares in a pirate gang!

In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. ...

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.

"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

There isn't a prospectus, but here's some testimony from an current investor!

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, etc.

(HT: Tyler Cowen and Eric Crampton.)

This "Awesomeness Manifesto" by Umair Haque hinges on a rather narrow definition for "innovation" so as to draw a contrast, but lets undermine the whole thing by highlighting the most glaring weakness.

Innovation relies on obsolescence. Innovation was a concept pioneered by the great Joseph Schumpeter. And to subscribe to it requires us to accept his theory of creative destruction. Gales of innovation make yesterday's goods and services obsolete. Yet, that, in turn, means that the price of innovation is recession and depression. The business cycle might never be vanquished — but it is getting more vicious with every decade. In an interdependent world, obsolescence is what's obsolete.

Innovation dries up our seedcorn. Innovation in its purest Schumpeterian sense is undertaken by entrepreneurs. And so today, we've got an economy where everything's for sale. Yet, little fundamentally new is being created. Businesses focus obsessively on the entrepreneurial aspects of commerce: we are focused still on selling the same old toxic, industrial era junk in slightly better ways. Yet, the challenge of the 21st century isn't entrepreneurial as much as it is creative: learning to create fundamentally better stuff in the first place.

"Obsolescence is what's obsolete" means what? For nothing to ever be made obsolete, nothing new and better may be created. Haque appears to dislike the concept of creative destruction becomes some peoples' wealth is destroyed in the process of making new people wealthy... but what's the alternative? Those who are presently rich and powerful must be allowed to stay that way? Societal calcification. Stagnation. Creative destruction isn't perfect, but generally, over time, what is destroyed is less valuable than what is created. That's not a waste of our seed-corn, that's how it's supposed to be used. Seeds are consumed when you plant them, but the resulting crops are worth more than the seed. Then you collect more seed and start the next round.

Should I kick Haque while he's down by pointing out that his definition for "innovation" is so narrow as to be useless?

What is innovative often fails to delight, inspire, and enlighten — because, as we've discussed, innovation is less concerned with raw creativity. Awesomeness puts creativity front and center. Awesome stuff evokes an emotive reaction because it's fundamentally new, unexpected, and 1000x better. Just ask Steve Jobs. The iPhone and iPod were pooh-poohed by analysts, who questioned how innovative they really were — but the Steve has turned multiple industries upside down through the power of awesomeness. ...

It's the most hackneyed phrase in the corporate lexicon: adding value. Let's face it: most value is an illusion. Nokia, Motorola, and Sony tried for a decade to "add value" to their phones — yet not a single feature did.

Except that, you know, the iPhone basically copied many of these features and then repackaged them in an innovative "awesome" style.

Innovation is creativity plus business purpose. The gripes Haque has with the term seem to be based on examples where those two ingredients are missing, so it's no wonder he's disenchanted. Instead of coining a new term, however, I suggest that we simple adopt a broader and more useful understanding of "innovation".

C. Edmund Wright makes an excellent analogy to explain why government officials aren't qualified to run the economy:

Can Barney Frank Dunk on Lebron? No, he cannot. Nor can anyone else in Washington. Nor can they catch passes from Ben Rothlisberger in the Super Bowl or strike out Derek Jeter in the World Series. They are not equipped to do so.

So what?

This ridiculous image speaks to the business malaise infecting the economy since Obama took office. The point is that politicians are equally ill-equipped to run the auto industry or the health industry or the lending industry or the insurance industry -- and their determination to do so is sucking all the dynamism from the entrepreneurial class in this country.

It's called hubris, and on the part of our leaders it will lead -- as it always does -- to tragedy. People need to know their limits, and in my experience the greatest part of humility is recognizing that everything wouldn't necessarily be "better" if I just had more power over you.

Are you a stock or a bond?

Human capital is a measure of the present value of your client’s future wages, income and salary (net of any future income taxes and expenses). For example, if she is a doctor, lawyer, engineer or even a professor, she has probably invested an enormous amount of time, effort and money to finance her education. That investment will hopefully pay off over many future years of productive labour income in the form of job dividends over the next 10, 20 or even 30 years. Sure, clients can’t really touch, feel or see human capital, but like an oil reserve deep under the sands of Alberta, it will eventually be extracted and so it’s definitely worth something now. ...

Your human capital can be viewed as a hedge against the losses in your financial capital. So, as a 50-, 40-, or especially 30-year old, you should be willing to take more chances with your total portfolio, perhaps even borrow to invest or leverage into the stock market, because you have the ability to mine more human capital if needed.

I'm sorta both (my job is fairly secure, but I'm also a bit entrepreneurial), but time-wise I spend most of my time as a bond. I have taken this into consideration as I have designed my investment portfolio, and definitely take more risks that I would if I were self-employed.

(HT: My Money Blog.)

I interviewed with Google, but I stopped returning their calls after the second interview because I thought their interview process was dumb. I don't think they would have hired me anyway, because I didn't really conceal my frustration with their questions. Nightmare Google interviews appear to be common, which begs the question: why?

“Estimate the number of students who are college seniors, attend four-year schools, and graduate with a job in the United States every year.” This time I remained poised.

“There are about 300 million people in the nation” I began. “Let’s say 10 million of those are college students at four year schools. Only ¼ of those 10 million are seniors, so that would be roughly 2-3 million. If half of those students graduate with jobs, you’re looking at about 1.5 million kids.”

“Would you say that number seems high, low, or just about right?”

“I would say it sounds low, but maybe that’s because I’m going through the job-search process and I’m wishing the number was higher.”

I didn’t even get a sympathetic laugh. “That’s all. Good luck with your job search.” The phone clicked-- I was stunned. The abrupt sign-off was a clear indication that I wouldn’t be considered for round 2.

In my own case, I was asked to provide compilable C++ code over the phone to the interviewer. The interviewer said I could use a pen and paper to write it out before reading it to him, but was flummoxed when I told him that that wouldn't be possible. I was interviewing for Google from the workplace of my then-current job, and I was on my cell phone outside because I couldn't very easily do that from my cubicle. I asked if I could give him pseudocode, but apparently he had to type my response into an actual compiler to verify my coding ability. Then we got into an argument about how to implement a merge sort. Then the interviewer tried to convince me that the correct answer to a question he asked was to use a quick sort algorithm because it's faster than merge sort. Of course quick sort is not faster than merge sort in a worse-case scenario, which I tried to explain, to no avail.

At this point I suggested that we move on to the next question, but the interviewer would not do so until I verbally related some compilable C++ code for my preferred sorting algorithm. I did my best, but I highly doubt that whatever I told him would compile and successfully execute a merge sort. After this we did move on, but I could tell that the interviewer was as frustrated as I was, and the rest of the conversation was tense.

So, why does Google interview this way? Sure, they want to restrict their hiring to smart people who are likely to fit in with their corporate culture, but what company doesn't want that? Most companies, however, couldn't get away with interview questions like these because they aren't in Google's enviable top-of-the-heap position. Google interviews the way it does for two reasons: because it can get away with it, and to feed the egos of employees. It's not clear to me that this interview style actually contributes to business performance, but it certainly does not eliminate the possibility of future comeuppance. When Google tumbles off the top of the heap, you can be sure that their interview style will find some humility.

Too bad this kid will one day learn that her parents bartered custody of her for sculptures.

Udo Fritz-Hermann Brandhorst, an heir to Germany’s Henkel AG & Co. fortune and a major art collector, avoided a public court case in New York by settling a lawsuit filed by his former mistress involving two Damien Hirst sculptures and a custody dispute.

The settlement was reached Sunday night according to the woman, Venetia Kapernekas, and Brandhorst’s lawyers.

Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.

Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter (Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho district valued at about $5 million to be held in the daughter’s name as sole owner; $5,000 a month in child support; and $640,000 to cover Kapernekas’s legal expenses, according to Kapernekas.

Sad, but maybe the sculptures were simply being used as leverage to provide for the daughter's future?

(HT: Marginal Revolution, Felix Salmon.)

Eamon Javers asks a contrarian question: "Is China headed toward collapse?".

Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.

First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”

Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth. ...

This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.

So how to hedge against China's failure?

Google Voice is facing a probe by the Federal Communications Commission because it bypasses legacy telecom regulations by arguing that it is a software company, not a communications company. The end result is that users save money and parasitic telephone companies lose government-protected revenue.

A group of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives called on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Google Inc's ability to block calls to rural telephone exchanges ...

Citing media reports, AT&T has said the Google Voice service was blocking costly calls to phone numbers in certain rural areas in order to cut down on expenses. Phone companies are banned from blocking calls. ...

In 2007, the FCC told carriers they could not restrict calls to avoid fees associated with adult chat lines or free conference calls by companies routing calls through rural carriers in order to generate fees.

Here's how it works:

1. Rural phone carriers are allowed by the FCC to charge higher rates to other phone companies for call that go through their network. These higher rates are allowed because without them it might not be possible to operate phone services in areas with low population density.

2. Phone sex companies set up in rural areas and make revenue-sharing agreements with rural phone companies so they can split the high fees. (Of course the high fees wouldn't be needed to support the rural phone companies if the phone sex call volume were taken into account, but the high rate rules have existed for decades and will never be revisited.)

3. Legislators from rural areas get campaign contributions from rural phone companies, so they will fight to protect the high rate phone sex scam in order to protect these contributions.

Google provides Voice for free and realized that a high percentage of its cost was arising from a small number of calls that were being routed through these rural phone companies, so they decided to block the calls to eliminate the fees. FCC regulations prohibit telecommunication companies from blocking any calls, but Google argues that it isn't a telecommunications company, isn't offering phone service, and is not subject to FCC regulation.

The spat prompted an attorney for some rural carriers, Ross Buntrock, to file a letter on October 1 with the FCC to complain that AT&T is refusing to pay its bills to rural carriers.

"The only difference between Google's alleged call blocking and AT&T's refusal to pay terminating access charges for conference and chat-line calls is that the (local carriers) are forced to incur the costs of terminating AT&T's customers' traffic," Buntrock wrote.

A Google spokesperson said on Thursday that for AT&T to invoke rural America while AT&T is behind in its payments to rural carriers is "the height of cynicism."

AT&T isn't paying the fees either, which provides additional support for the obvious conclusion: the special high rates these rural phone companies are allowed to charge should be eliminated. The regulations intended to ensure that rural residents have phone service available have been corrupted to enrich rent-seekers, as most government regulations are. Let's deregulate, eliminate the parasites, and let the free market sort it out.

Apparently some people are faking swine flu to get out of work.

“All you have to do is call in and say, ‘I’m sick,’ and take a couple of days off, and you and I will not be shocked,” says Dr. William Schaffner, head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.

The ploy worked for one twentysomething New Yorker, looking to get a day off work. “My brother goes to a school that had been hit really hard, and since I visited him, it was completely plausible I could get it," says Jessica, who works in ad sales. (She didn't want her last name used to protect her secret identity as a swine flu faker.)

I have a feeling that these lazy people weren't otherwise hesitating to lie to get out of work. Sometimes I don't see how businesses get anything done at all.

(HT: RD.)

CNN Money has compiled a list of the 50 best careers in America. Looks like "software developer" has dropped down to number 12! I guess I'd better start taking night classes in anesthesiology.

(HT: JK.)

I'm a week late to this story that hits right in my field of expertise! Apparently the Netflix prediction contest has been won!

The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.

The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.

That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over and said two teams had passed the 10-percent threshold, BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members. Netflix publicly said the finish was too close to call. But Netflix officials at the time privately informed BellKor it had won. Though further review of the algorithms by expert judges was needed, it certainly seemed BellKor was the winner, as it turned out to be.

When the contest was announced I wasn't sure that a 10% improvement was possible given the dataset. Apparently I was wrong! Still, it was a close thing... if they had made the requirement 11% would they have still found a winner?

I love these sorts of contests. They're great for the issuer and for the winner because the cost is almost entirely borne by the many losers.

Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10-percent hurdle. “Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. “Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don’t work.”

Tens of thousands of man-years spent for Netflix's benefit, for a total cost to the company of under $2 million (including administrative costs). Slate runs some numbers.

Imagine if Netflix had paid all these math whizzes the prevailing wage—say, $100,000 a year. The company would have had to shell out more than $3 million for just one year of the top performers' time, and that's assuming it could've sussed out who the top performers were going to be. Of course, many of the programmers worked far longer than a year, some of them setting aside their primary occupations in order to work on the Netflix problem full-time. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted to the New York Times, "You look at the cumulative hours and you're getting Ph.D.s for a dollar an hour."

But even that number discounts the contest's true benefits to Netflix. Had the company simply put out a help-wanted ad for software engineers, it probably wouldn't have been able to recruit many of the geniuses it found through the competition. That's because most of them already have other jobs. BellKor's members work for, among others, AT&T and Yahoo, and many members of the Ensemble are employed by the data-consulting firm Opera Solutions. The participants also spanned the globe. Netflix got submissions from people in more than 100 countries, and the winning team's members worked in New Jersey, Montreal, Israel, and Austria.

That's the main reason why I didn't enter the competition. The only way to really win is to be the one issuing the challenge.

Socialism is collapsing in Europe but we should definitely be trying it here in America!

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Socialism just doesn't work.

Also, viewing the current financial difficulties as a "challenge to capitalism" is moronic and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the benefits of capitalism and the costs of burdensome regulation and government meddling. Capitalism promises efficient allocation of resources over time, not an endless trouble-free creation of wealth. Bumps in the road are par for the course, not a challenge to the capitalistic model.

Interesting observations about a Chinese Wal-Mart in Beijing.

They can’t compete on price in China, of course. So my guess is that they are trying to compete on selection, convenience, and customer service (thus all the sampling). That you can return stuff was very clear.

Also, they sell live turtles... for food or pets? Unknown.

(HT: BM.)

The new Mississippi River Bridge is being delayed due to conflicts over whether the contracting process is too sexist but not racist enough.

The Missouri Department of Transportation will delay awarding a contract to build the new Mississippi River bridge until it determines whether minority contractors are being fully utilized in the St. Louis region, the department announced Tuesday.

The delay comes after minority contractors raised concerns this summer that the state hasn't been involving them in projects to the same level as it has women contractors. MoDOT is studying whether women and minority-owned businesses are being used to their fullest potential in transportation work. If the study shows that they are not, the state plans to ask the federal government for permission to have separate hiring goals for both groups in the $640 million bridge project.

Normally "women- and minority-owned businesses" are lumped together for preferential treatment, but minorities are complaining that sexism and racism should be separated because sexism is crowding out racism.

As a member of the group that these "goals" are specifically designed to exclude -- a white male -- I can't help but be amused. Here's an idea: hire the company that does the best work for the best value!

Paul Graham writes about the differences between mangers' schedules and makers' schedules.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

Basically right. This is also why adding management responsibilities to an engineer typically makes his engineering work disproportionally less efficient. Maybe I should try blocking off mornings or afternoons for "actual work" (as engineers refer to the stuff they do when they aren't in meetings).