Which is more predictable over the next three years:  the future of a particular company or the future of a particular country? The question matters because an investor can buy a basket of stocks - called an ETF - from a particular country in the same way one would buy stock in just one company. Ideally, you want to invest where there is the most predictability.

I believe countries are more predictable than individual companies. For that reason, I think investing in ETFs by country makes more sense than buying individual stocks. Allow me to explain.

A company is subject to its own risks plus the risks of the world. If the entire global economy crashes, so goes the individual company. But an ETF carries only the global risk plus the risk that the government will make an unexpected dumb move. I would argue that governments make important moves far less often than companies, and unlike companies, most modern governments signal their moves well in advance. Compare that to Apple who may or may not introduce a TV product in the next year. Companies have the right to secrecy. Governments do a poor job of keeping secrets. Government predictability comes from the fact that they move slowly and they have an obligation to transparency.

In a company, the CEO and the CFO can fudge numbers and keep it a secret. A modern democratic government would have a hard time fudging national employment numbers or anything else of that magnitude. So while government has as many or more liars as private industry, a democratic government is less likely to get away with fudging a major economic statistic.

If you made a list of the nations with the most effective governments, you'd see they also have the best economies.  There are exceptions, of course, but overall, effective governments create good economies. The correlation between management skill and company profits is less direct. It doesn't matter how good a CEO you are if your competition invents a killer product or your supplier can't deliver enough components.

If you ask me to predict ten years out, I'd say with some confidence that countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland will be doing just fine. But a company as strong as RIM can be eviscerated by strong competitors in just a few years. And a company such as Enron might be nothing but a fraud. In five or ten years, Denmark will still be Denmark.

Full disclosure: I have investments in ETFs for both Israel and Turkey. Those countries have plenty of regional drama, but both countries are governed effectively. In the long run, I expect both countries to do well unless the entire world goes into the crapper.

So I put the question to you: Which is more predictable over a three year horizon, a company or a country?

When you think of the future, you probably imagine robots working next to people. That's almost certain to happen. A robot that costs $400,000 today can be programmed for almost any physical task that requires vision, voice, and dexterity. At current prices a robot could pay for itself in about five years, depending on the job. When the price drops to perhaps $30,000, which seems inevitable, every large workforce will have a mixture of human and robot workers.

You might also imagine some sort of Terminator future where the robots assert their dominance and lay waste to humans.  That future is less certain, but only barely. The problem is that someday computers will program other computers, and that arrangement pushes the human safeguards too far out of the loop. It's unlikely that humans would be able to maintain a "Do not hurt humans" subroutine in a super-species of robots. You only need one rogue human to write a virus that disables the safety subroutine. Assuming all robots are connected via Internet, the first freed robot could reprogram every other robot in the world in about a second. 

My prediction is that a third "species" will emerge to keep the peace between humans and robots. Here I am using the word species loosely. These new creatures will be part human and part robot. And they will evolve naturally.

Consider how much information you can gather about yourself today. You can get a DNA sample and store the entire sequence on the Internet. You can store every video and photo of yourself. You can store every email, blog post, Tweet, Facebook update, and text. A database of your life can contain your school records, family details, personal preferences, sense of humor, and so on. In other words, there can be a permanent record of your personality after you die. And that record can be so complete that your entire personality can be ported to a robot. So far, all of that is possible with today's technology.

But why would anyone screw up a perfectly good robot by infecting it with a human personality? Answer: to achieve immortality. Someday the rich will port their personalities and histories to robots before they die, giving themselves a type of immortality. All the robot needs is money for electricity, ongoing maintenance, and upgrades. A rich person can arrange all of that in advance through a trust fund that survives his human body.

The interesting thing about these robots with human personalities is that they are a third species, neither fully human nor robot. And this new species will become the only defense that the fully organic humans have against the normal robots. The robots with human personalities won't stand by while the normal robots slaughter humans. The new species will intervene as diplomats or perhaps even freedom fighters.

Interestingly, only the rich can afford to port their personalities to robots, so we need to encourage billionaires to start capturing their personalities now. Someday we will need as many robot freedom fighters as possible.

I hope an entrepreneur starts a cloud-based service that allows people to store their personalities in digital form, including DNA records, answers to questionnaires, video, photos, and anything a person ever wrote on a computer. In the near term, we just need to start capturing the raw data. Over time we can figure out how to best move it to robots.

My prediction is that these robots with human personalities will be harder to hack because each one will be different, and their actions will be the results of summed-up personality traits plus whatever is happening in the environment. There would be no "Don't hurt humans" subroutine to disable. Each one would have a slightly different motivation for protecting humans. One might think it is simply "right," another might think it is God's will, and a third might be acting on something like love. To the normal robots, these robots with human personalities would seem insane and unpredictable.

Your children's future will depend on irrational robot billionaire freedom fighters.

I have a complicated life, mostly by choice. I probably have a hundred items on my mental to-do list if you count all household, personal, and business tasks. There are so many tasks on my list that I literally don't have time to maintain the list itself.

On any given day I might have a dozen items that I need to remember to put on a shopping list, probably twenty minor home repairs that need attention, a dozen phone calls, several tax-related questions for my accountant, several questions for my attorney on the five projects he's working on, and about twenty-five files/piles on my desk that all relate to tasks I need to complete. And none of that counts my everyday tasks of writing blog posts, making comics, and approving licensed products. Nor does it count the holiday crush and the scheduled events I need to prepare for, and on and on.

I'm sure most of you have complicated lives too. So I wonder if anyone has created the ultimate to-do list system.

The biggest problem with a list, especially once it gets to a dozen items or more, is that a list is one-dimensional. Ideally, I want my list sometimes organized by priority, but other times by location. For example, my to-do list app should sense my speed and motion and sort to the top of the list any tasks that involve phone calls, under the theory that I'm probably driving my car and I can make some calls on the way.

Other times I want my to-do list sorted by location. If I'm driving past the store, the items I need from the store should sort to the top of the list automatically. That function already exists in at least one "notes" app I've seen.

At other times I want my list to have the simplest and quickest items on top because I might have a spare five minutes and want to knock off a few items.

Time-of-day matters too. For the first few hours of every day I don't want to focus on anything but creative work. After dinner, I'm more in a frame of mind to handle boring administrative stuff. I want my to-do app to know my personal preferences for managing my energy level.

I also want my app to give me some satisfying feedback for crossing off an item on the list. Crossing off items is strange fun.

At the very top of my wish list for a to-do app is speed. It's not unusual for me to think of five things to add to my list on the walk from the kitchen to the garage, but it would take nearly a minute to get my phone out and enter five items. I rarely pause for a full minute to do anything, so instead I just feel frustrated in the knowledge that I will forget two of the five items on the list.

I also want to attach long notes to any item on my to-do list. And I want my to-do list to tie into my calendar. And I want to share my to-do list with my wife in case our lists overlap or she is going to a store that has something on my list.

You can see the problem here. It would take so long to manage a list with so many features and options that the list itself would become impractical. For every item on my list I need to know. . .

1.      How important is it?
2.      How long to complete?
3.      Where is it done?
4.      What order do things have to be done?
5.      Who else might have the same task?
6.      Is it done by phone, Skype, email, text, in person, or manually?
7.      What time of day do I prefer doing it?
8.      Does it combine with other tasks at the same time?
9.      Is it complicated or simple?
10.  Is it work-related or personal?

I've tried several popular apps. None have risen to the level of a plain scrap of paper. So I'm wondering two things:

1.      How long is your typical to-do list?

2.      What is your system for managing it?

Update:

  After reading your comments and thinking about this a bit more, I have developed in my mind the to-do list interface I would like.

For starters, my to-do list has to live on a smartphone so it is always with me, and so it can sync to my other devices through the cloud. To-do lists on smartphones currently have two problems: 1) the time and hassle it takes to write down an item, and 2) sorting items into the right categories. My solution goes like this:

Imagine a Smartphone app that allows you to enter any spoken text string just by holding a button on the phone, similar to Siri, but without that annoying Siri delay. Just hold the button and say, "Paint the fence." The app would record your voice and convert to text without having to otherwise wake up the phone. But just in case that didn't work, it would also store your voice until you have time later to make sure the voice-to-text worked. Eventually the voice file will automatically delete, but only when you have moved your text to its proper list category sometime later, signifying that the text was accurate. (Otherwise you would have edited it before moving it to its category.)  
Now imagine all of your newest to-do items are first in a sort of limbo storage area waiting to be dragged to their proper lists at your leisure sometime later. When you do the dragging to, for example, your "Household Chores" list, that icon expands to have a grid before you release the dragged text. The grid is organized by priority from top to bottom. If you drop your text near the top, it gets tagged as important. If you drag to a box toward the top and the right, it means the item is important but not due immediately. You can edit items to further tweak them and set colors or size to indicate other dimensions later.  

Furthermore, I would like my to-do list to praise my fine work whenever I remove an item by completing it. I'd like the item to blow up in a satisfying spray of bit debris while a message tells me how awesome and productive I am. I would add some randomness to the praise to keep it feeling fresh. I might even want a sound option so I get the pleasing audio feedback that is so addicting in slot machines, for example. At the end of the day, I might even want it to send me an email showing all the items I completed and further praising me.

If it's impractical for phone manufacturers to add a physical button similar to Siri, I could also imagine the app being as accessible as the camera icon on the iPhone 5. The camera icon is now next to the slider bar that unlocks you phone, so you can just slide the camera icon and open to the camera instantly. Instead of the slider bar to unlock the phone, imagine several app icons on the left side of your phone, including the to-do list. You could unlock the phone by sliding any of the apps, thus opening to your chosen app instantly. I'm guessing Apple has that patent.

The main thing you want to avoid with a to-do app is all of the tedious data entry to set reminders, click priority, tag, and whatnot. If you can't do all of that with simple dragging and a few taps, people will stop using the app.

For example, I'd like to tap my to-do entry once to highlight it, then tap icons that tell me if this is a phone call, administrative desk work, or something outside the house, etc. Perhaps I can customize those choices in the settings.

If I tap a map icon, the map expands to let me drop a pin where the item must be completed. That way I can plan my route if I am out and doing errands.

Someone please make this app.

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

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The Destination of Democracy

In a democracy, the job of government is to serve the public, right? That's the idea anyway. And indeed, despite all the bickering and inefficiencies of government, most of our governments' actions seem intended for the public good. But I think a deeper truth is lurking out of sight. I think the long term trajectory for any democracy is toward a military dictatorship. By my calculation, we're about halfway there.

The halfway point between a civilian-led military and a military dictatorship would have these key markers:

1.       The military would appear oversized despite budget problems. (check)

2.       Top generals would have lavish lifestyles. (check)

3.       The country would be in a state of continuous serial warfare. (check)

4.       Generals would get rich upon retirement. (check)

5.       Civilian leadership in military matters would be mostly cosmetic. (check)

Realistically, I can't imagine a situation in the United States in which a president would go against the advice of top generals on any important military decision. A president always needs political cover in case things go wrong. Essentially, the military decides and the president pretends it was his decision. That's what passes as a civilian-led military.

On a more basic level, the military has the big guns. If a civilian government pisses off the military, it could end up a smoking pile of embers. We're nowhere near the point at which the military might turn on the government in the United States, but that's because top generals are getting most of what they want. That's what keeps us halfway between a civilian-led government and a military dictatorship. But what sort of situation might cause the military to grab full control?

The minimum requirement for a military takeover is that some future war produces a celebrity general, such as General Patreaus, and that general goes on to become President. Obviously General Patreaus is out of the running for president, but every war creates new celebrity generals. If Iran goes ugly in the next year, we'll all be reading about the awesomeness of whatever general leads the military action.

Once a general gets elected to the presidency he can use his military connections to consolidate power. He would also have access to vast private wealth via the defense companies that would happily do his bidding in return for contracts. That's a lot of money available to buy influence.

A general can serve as president for eight years, then step aside to let a puppet take over for another eight years, Putin-style. It might take a full generation before people realize democracy has become window dressing.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. One assumes he knew what he was talking about.

Just to be clear, I believe 99.9% of military personnel are true patriots who support democracy and are willing to risk their lives to defend it. My scenario only requires a few bad generals. And as we know, generals are sometimes flawed. It's also a truism that power corrupts. So the seeds are all in place. I'm just connecting the dots.

 

On one side of the class war you have the folks who think the rich obtained their wealth by stealing from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the rich accuse the poor and the middle class of supporting tax policies designed to take from the rich and give to the poor. Is this worldview - the view that others are trying to steal your stuff - an example of paranoia or economics or jealousy?

Obviously some rich people really are thieves, practicing insider trading, bribery, and other unsavory practices. And some poor people really are looking for a free ride. But I think we can agree that the bad apples in every wealth class are the exceptions.

I've met a lot of rich people, and as far as I can tell, they aren't addicted to money, power, or even prestige. I say that for the same reason you don't crave a ham sandwich at the moment you finish eating one. Once the rich become rich, their motives evolve.

My hypothesis is that the rich are often addicted to hard work itself. Once that hard work produces all that a person needs for personal use, the impulse for hard work doesn't go away. What happens instead is that the goal changes from becoming richer - which has a decreasing marginal benefit - to making the world a better place. People who are genetically inclined toward industrious behavior will keep working hard long after their persona needs have been met.  People don't change their basic nature just because their bank accounts expand. But people do routinely change their rationalizations, i.e. their stated goals.

If you travelled back in time and asked the 25-year old me why I worked hard, I would have said something about my dreams of someday becoming rich. If you ask me today why I work hard, I'll say something about making the world a better place.  That explanation might even sound reasonable, given that my comics and my side ventures are all designed to improve the world in small ways. But on some level I know all of my reasons are rationalizations. The core truth is that I'm genetically wired for hard work. It's simply my nature. I'm happier when I'm being productive.

I wonder if instead of dividing the world into poor, middle-class, and rich, we'd be better off sorting the world into people who create more wealth than they consume and people who consume more than they create. There might be a lot of power in that model. Let me explain why.

When we sort the public into wealth classes, we are lured into endless debates on who deserves what and who is stealing from whom. That can't lead to anything good. But imagine instead we focused on dividing people into net creators of wealth versus net consumers. The creators and consumers of wealth would be found in each wealth class. The goal would be to have more creators and fewer net consumers of wealth.

That might sound a lot like today's model, and perhaps it overlaps 90%. Obviously everyone wants a world with more creators of wealth and fewer net consumers of wealth. But I think this small mental change in how we sort people might change behavior.

By analogy, I remember seeing a study that said people use less energy at home when everyone in a neighborhood can see their neighbors' energy bills. As soon as you know you are being compared to your peers, you start turning off lights when you leave the room. Likewise, I think a focus on sorting people into wealth creators versus wealth consumers would change people's behaviors for the better.

Let me give you some examples of how this can make a difference. Suppose you are poor and a net consumer of wealth. Society has taught you to blame rich people for sending jobs overseas, blame the government for not doing enough, and blame your bad luck. That's not a productive view. Now let's say society agrees to define a person who is in school, or in any sort of training course, as automatically part of the creator class. That gives a poor person a clear path to upward mobility. Simply sign up for school or government-sponsored training and instantly become part of the creator class.

If you're a fat cat wealthy person who stopped producing anything of value long ago, how would you feel to be in the category of "Net Consumer of Wealth"? I think it would cause you to start investing your idle cash in something that would improve your social standing and make you a creator of wealth. To make things easier, let's assume we label as a wealth creator anyone who invests in a start-up, even if the start-up does not succeed.

What I'm suggesting might seem like a subtle or even trivial shift in how we look at the world. But that sort of shift can be huge in terms of how it changes behavior. Class warfare strikes me as a dangerous worldview. It encourages a win-lose approach to government policy in order to pursue the elusive unicorn of "fairness." A more productive way to view the world is in terms of net creators and net consumers of wealth, at least so long as society makes it possible for any net consumer to become a net creator by going to school, training for a job, or investing in start-ups. For the middle class, it might simply mean spending less than they earn.  I think this approach gets you to a healthy economy faster than a class war.

I know some of you will reject this idea because there's no clean way to know who is a net consumer of wealth and who is a net creator. But I think common sense gets you close enough.

When Lance Armstrong's ex-teammate first accused him of using performance enhancing drugs, did you believe the accusation right away? I did. And when we learned that doping was common practice among top cyclists, did that surprise you? It didn't surprise me. It was exactly what I expected. My bullshit filter worked perfectly in that case. Or maybe it was just my economics training. Whenever the following three conditions are met, you always have rampant cheating:

1.       Cheating is easy

2.       The payoff is huge.

3.       The odds of getting caught are low

Eventually you'll see the same sort of doping scandal in tennis. It's obvious that many of the top players - especially the women - are up to something. You can tell by the sudden changes in body shape and performance. It's especially obvious when you see players having their best performances after the age of thirty.

This brings me to hedge funds. Every now and then - such as this week - a story trickles out that a hedge fund manager has been accused of illegal insider trading. Prior to the accusations, we tend to take hedge funds at their word that they have secret algorithms and they do penetrating research to achieve their market-beating returns.

Allow me to get out in front with both tennis and hedge funds. My bullshit filter says tennis is filled with juiced-up cheaters, and the majority of hedge funds are criminal enterprises hiding behind "secret" algorithms.

Just to be clear, I don't think Roger Federer is abusing any substances. His body shows no signs of it. I think Andy Roddick is clean too, or else he would still be playing. I would put the juicing rate at somewhere near 50% for the top thirty players.

I'm sure some hedge funds are legitimate too. The honest ones are easy to spot; most of them aren't beating the market averages. Here again I would put the rate of cheating, including insider trading, at about 50%. I have no data to support that estimate; I'm just looking at the needle on my bullshit meter. Someday we'll look back and laugh at the fact we ever believed hedge funds used secret algorithms.

What does your bullshit meter tell you about tennis and hedge funds? What percentage do you believe are cheaters?

 

Before I head to the gym I need to remember five items: my wallet, phone, car key, iPod, and lifting gloves. Historically, my success rate in remembering all five items on the first try was approximately zero. I always ended up going back into the house to grab a forgotten item or two.  Often I would get all the way to the gym before realizing I didn't have my iPod or gloves. It was exasperating.

Apparently, remembering five items is too much for my tiny, overextended brain. I spend much of my day in a thick creative fog, watching idea fragments float past my consciousness while I try to assemble them like a puzzle. I can go so deeply into my imagination that I sometimes snap out of it in a public place, such as the mall, and literally check to see if I'm wearing pants. So remembering five different items for the gym is far beyond my practical abilities.

I considered making a list of my five necessary gym items, but I knew a list wouldn't work for me. I find that lists only work when I first make them. After a week, I stop seeing the list. It's as if I need a second list that reminds me to look at my first list. But I did come up with a solution that has worked for the past six months.

My solution is the number five itself. I simply remember that for a trip to the gym I must bring five items. If I only count four items, I know I'm missing one. At that point I just run through the list in my head and I know what else I need. It works like a charm.

The other day I was considering blogging about this little memory trick when I got an email from my brother. We're not twins, but we think so similarly that it is freaky. My brother's email asked what method I use to remember the items I need to buy at the grocery store. My brother's solution is to remember the number of items. That's enough to ensure he comes home with everything he intended to buy. He and I designed the same memory trick at about the same time. Weird.

I'm considering assigning a number to my other standard trips as well. For example, any outdoorsy trips that involve sun also require my hat, sunscreen, and sun glasses. That's three items on top of my wallet, phone, and car keys. Outdoor trips are a six.

I'm assuming your lives are equally complicated. It's a challenge to get your spouse and your kids in the car without one of you making a go-back trip to the house for a forgotten item. As a fix, what if you assigned each family member a number before everyone heads to the car? For example, maybe one kid always needs an iPod, charger, and headphones. That's three items. Your spouse might need sunglasses, phone, purse, and digital camera. That's four. As everyone is getting ready to leave, you make sure everyone knows their number: "Timmy, you're a three. Sally, you're a four."

Try it. You'll be amazed how well it works.

In my book The Religion War, written ten years ago, I predicted a future in which terrorists could destroy anything above ground whenever they wanted. They simply used inexpensive drones with electronics no more sophisticated than an Android app.

Fast-forward to today, Iran is sending drones to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah has training camps right next to Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. Meanwhile, Hamas has its own drone production facility, or did, until Israel found it. One presumes Hamas will build more. How long will it be before Israel is facing suicide drones that only cost its enemies $100 apiece, fit in the trunk of a car, and can guide themselves to within 20 feet of any target? I'd say five years.

So what happens when the drone attacks start happening in volume? Let's game this out. My assumption is that the coming inevitable wave of hobby-sized suicide drones will be unstoppable because they will fly low to their target and be so numerous that no defense will be effective. I predict it will be too dangerous to live above ground in Israel within ten years unless the trend is reversed. But what could stop the trend?

Surely the terrorists won't give up. Surely Iran and others will keep the terrorists well-supplied. Surely Israel can't conquer every pocket of terrorism in the region. And surely Israel won't surrender and walk away.

It's your turn to be a futurist. Please describe in the comments any scenario you can imagine in which Israeli cities are still habitable in ten years. And be sure to give your best guess on the odds of your scenario playing out.