365 OneDrive

Today I was in the thick of my quarterly writing assignments. We’ve moved from the Purcell remote server, AKA Purver, to 365 OneDrive. My friend Kyle Purcell is the founder of Purcell Communications, which runs a stable of two dozen financial writers for hire. My tired brain had to learn new navigation tricks to work on OneDrive instead of the Purver, while churning out 700 carefully crafted words about fund performance relative to MSCI EAFE and MSCI All Country World ex US. I did stupid things like use a 12-month attribution sheet instead of 3-month. Then I couldn’t delete it from the shared file I had uploaded it to. Hours of that kind of crap. It is well paid, however.

My main route of escape is Facebook and pictures of cats. Facebook is a weird universe of extremes--cute stuff, swing dance videos, and the glowering atmosphere being nurtured by the Tories and Trump. I reposted a piece by the brilliant writer Fintan O’Toole about how Trump is the master of marketing trials (learned from toying with the media and shaping a “reality” TV show). What he is marketing now is fascism: "Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.”
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