Politics

This past weekend, I stood in the middle of the third fairway and found myself facing golf’s equivalent of a microeconomic dilemma.

To look at me today you might not know it, but there was a time when I was an avid distance runner. Over a nine-year period, I trained for seven marathons, ran in and finished five; ran two half-marathons; completed a dozen 10-milers and an equal amount of 10ks; and regularly logged 25-28 miles a week.

This past week, my daughter had her—ahem—birthday. Together, my wife, son, daughter, and I all went to dinner. It sounds simple, but it’s something we don’t do often enough since the kids moved on, we sold our home, and downsized into a condo. While I knew I was getting the bill at the end of the meal, for the most part, I just sat back and enjoyed the good-natured ribbing my son and daughter gave one another.

I’ve been wanting to write for some time about the link between Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in business; it just hadn’t completely come together for me until this past week. My wife and I were sitting on the couch, watching the Olympics, and we saw something that shocked us.

I’m a member of the Conference Board’s Government Relations Executive Council (GRE), made up of the government relations leads from some of the world’s largest companies. The Government Affairs departments at these companies range from Air BnB’s 70-person global government affairs team to Emerson’s one-woman shop. The GRE meets three times a year—typically, once at the Conference Board’s New York headquarters, once at a member company site, and once in Washington. This week, we visited Lowe’s 25-story Tech Hub in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Hence my photo in the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte.)

At the risk of stating the obvious, President Joe Biden’s (and by extension any Democratic presidential candidate’s) reelection campaign is in serious trouble. In fact, a longtime Democratic political consultant went on record days ago stating that only an ‘October Surprise’ could save him.

The political events over the past two weeks and a private email conversation I had with a professor from my GWU grad school days got me thinking about the law of supply and demand. I know what you’re thinking… “Me too, what else would Supreme Court decisions, a presidential debate, the NATO summit, and the runup to the political conventions make one think about.”

My wife and I downsized a couple years ago. Like many parents, we became empty nesters once our kids went away to college. After four years of school for one, and five for another, my son headed to New York with a girlfriend, and my daughter decided she wanted to live much closer to work than our suburban Maryland home could afford her.

My wife and I downsized a couple years ago. Like many parents, we became empty nesters once our kids went away to college. After four years of school for one, and five for another, my son headed to New York with a girlfriend, and my daughter decided she wanted to live much closer to work than our suburban Maryland home could afford her.

Have you received your new Social Security Statement yet? I got mine. Among other things, it provides personalized monthly retirement benefit estimates, which display how much one can expect to receive depending on the age one retires, between 62 and 70. Although I’m not quite eligible to receive benefits yet, based on the figures alone, I’ll be working a while longer.