Elephants

We were in Thailand for two weeks and we visited two different elephant sanctuaries. Elephants are native to Thailand and have been domesticated there for hundreds of years. Many of these elephants are treated poorly, especially as they get older. So these sanctuaries try to acquire these elephants to treat them humanely and they offer tours to cover expenses.

The two sanctuaries we visited were quite different. The first was outside of Chiang Mai. It was an hour drive into the country. For the tour, we put on a special outfit (we were told the elephants had been trained to expect food from people dressed in red) with boots and a bamboo hat. That would have been fine, but it was crazy hot. Important side note, it’s better to visit Thailand in December/January than in May, but we were there for a wedding, so we didn’t choose the date.

So we meet the elephants and feed them a ton of bananas:

Then the elephants need to go for a walk and eat more real food. So we walk with them while their handlers are chopping up banana trees for them to eat.

This is interesting to watch, but did I mention how hot it was? We are pretty much puddles of sweat at this point. My wife and daughter are ready to bail, but the elephants have their routine and we have to follow it. After they eat they walk to a pool to cool off and get muddy.

And then they walk to a separate pool where we go in with them to wash them off. As hot as we were, that was much appreciated.

The second elephant sanctuary was in Phuket. It had the same mission but a very different tour. In the first tour, we followed the elephant’s routine. This tour was geared towards the tourists. If it hadn’t been so damn hot I might have preferred the more natural approach of the first tour, but in the heat the second was much better. There were similarities, we started out feeding the elephants bananas (no silly outfit).

Then, just a short distance away, we gave them a mud bath.

Then, also a short distance away, we go in a small pool and splash them with water to get the mud off.

And finally, under a totally artificial shower structure, we brushed them clean. All of this happened in an area about the size of a baseball diamond, so it wasn’t exactly hard for the tourists. And Phuket was about ten degrees cooler than Chiang Mai, so hot, but not brutally so.

So while the first tour was much more natural, there’s something to be said for not collapsing of heat exhaustion. And the second tour was much quicker, getting us back to the beach…

April 2020

Courtesy of Google Maps, every place I went in the entire month of April. It’s usually a much bigger map…

Don’t Mess With Texas

Don't mess with Texas. [via @shwood] pic.twitter.com/chYAMuhrYt

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) March 4, 2020

Y’all…

Dirty Cars

This is pretty cool.

NYC Evolution

This may be mostly interesting to New Yorkers, but I enjoyed this video which animates the growth of New York from the initial settlements to today. I thought the pace of the video was too slow so I recommend running it at double speed:

Details on this project here.

Me Cookie Monster

Cookie Monster was my favorite Sesame Street character growing up. Cookie Monster doing a Reddit AMA made me literally laugh out loud.

Reddit is a bit hard to embed, but some examples:

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And:

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inIAmA

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And:

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Just read the whole  thing, it’s hilarious…

Rake America Great Again

The entire country of Finland is apparently trolling Trump with the #haravointi hashtag (means raking in Finnish)

Here I am just #raking around as all us #finns do to prevent forest fires. pic.twitter.com/lNFUiQoqmj

— Iida Kor Honen 🇺🇦 (@iidaKorhonen) November 18, 2018

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqU6TnrAg8y/

Tweet of the Night

Is it possible to be angry and hopeful and drunk and sober all at the same time?

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) November 7, 2018

We Are All More Grumpy

In a typically insightful article by Om Malik about Skype, he wrote a line that resonated so much with me:

We are all more grumpy. And remember — we all got grumpy about phone companies, and we got Skype — a simple, easy to use and highly useful (if not pretty) product that was worth billions, and beloved by millions.

 

 

Index Fund Beats Hedge Funds

Warren Buffett apparently made a bet 10 years ago that a basic S&P index fund with low fees would outperform hedge funds on aggregate. He put his money where his mouth was, offering a $500,000 bet to any hedge fund manager. The manager would have to pick 5 hedge funds and they would compare how the 5 performed against the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund.

I publicly offered to wager $500,000 that no investment pro could select a set of at least five hedge funds – wildly-popular and high-fee investing vehicles – that would over an extended period match the performance of an unmanaged S&P-500 index fund charging only token fees. I suggested a ten-year bet and named a low-cost Vanguard S&P fund as my contender. I then sat back and waited expectantly for a parade of fund managers – who could include their own fund as one of the five – to come forth and defend their occupation. After all, these managers urged others to bet billions on their abilities. Why should they fear putting a little of their own money on the line?

What followed was the sound of silence. Though there are thousands of professional investment managers who have amassed staggering fortunes by touting their stock-selecting prowess, only one man – Ted Seides – stepped up to my challenge. Ted was a co-manager of Protégé Partners, an asset manager that had raised money from limited partners to form a fund-of-funds – in other words, a fund that invests in multiple hedge funds.

Like Warren Buffett needs more money, but he won the bet. None of the five hedge funds individually outperformed the S&P 500 and on average the hedge funds returned 7.1% compared to the S&P 85%. Not even close.