A. Robert Aldrich and Mickey Spillane’s classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) has been leaked online. It was one film noir that I studied with expert Geoff Mayer in La Trobe University’s cinema studies / film criticism program. Spillane’s script is insightful about Hays Production Code era depictions of crime, national security, gendered norms, and information revelation processes which are used to uncover layered deceptions and counterdeceptions (relevant to counterintelligence capabilities). The film also deals with a dual use research scenario. Very highly recommended. Mark Dillon provides further insights.
B. Australia’s pension / superannuation fund sector is exposed to the market risk of a downturn. A precursor of what might happen is the March 2020 period when the COVID-19 pandemic went global: see memoirs by Alex Gurevich and the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson. For background on longevity risk see the PBS Frontline documentary The Retirement Gamble and RealVision’s Raoul Pal (a hedge fund manager with an institutional sales background) on The Coming Retirement Crisis Explained and Retirement: What You Don’t Know Will Bankrupt You. For retail investors, Noel Whittaker’s Retirement Made Simple (Noel Whittaker Books, 2022) is an accessible start: consult a qualified financial planner.
C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on financial crises.
D. A new academic study of long-term romantic relationships has found that couples who met online have reported being less satisfied. You can read the new academic study here (open access).
E. Netflix has released a teaser trailer for the forthcoming film Ballad of a Small Player. I have not been to Macau but I did have a father who had untreated Gambling Disorder. I once told him about Natasha Dow Schull’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) which he defensively laughed off. One significant error that my father made was to pick a gambling instrument (slot machines) that do not have a mathematical positive expectacy of predictable outcomes (he was convinced that he and his friends had developed a Holy Grail system - he appeared to be using a martingale approach that of course eventually “blew up”). He should have studied mathematician and quantitative hedge fund founder Ed Thorp (Chat With Traders interview; The Professor Blackjack documentary; the classic Beat The Dealer; the memoir A Man For All Markets; and the William Poundstone overview Fortune’s Formula). The last time my father and I were in a casino together was in Hamilton, New Zealand in 2016 for my grandmother’s funeral: I walked across the road and bought a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s second book Fooled By Randomness (the first of his Incerto series) which is about apophenia: seeing patterns that are not there. My father also ignored this book as I watched him spend money on his slot machines - I spent $NZD10 for Taleb’s advice. He died less than a year later of a preventable “death of despair” (authors Anne Case and Angus Deaton). The morning of the day before he died we spoke by phone: I told him that despite our very difficult relationship I loved him. He then hung up on me. Rest in power.