Two men, I know indirectly, made a lot of money when they were young, trading commodities: copper, aluminum, coffee, cotton... I never inquired what exactly.
These commodity traders, masters of at least a part of the economy, provide me with two more examples of what I've been writing about, my admiration for experts, persons with a thorough knowledge of some field of knowledge.
Of course, they used to hang such speculators, as, while providing no practical good, they raise prices for the rest of us. But that's a different discussion.
Commodities trading is gambling, wagering if the market will go up or down. These days you can gamble on almost anything through the betting site Polymarket.
Someone there won $4 million dollars when Mamdami won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, recognizing, well before the event, that Mandami's charisma (or sociopathic charm, depending on which side of the whole socialism thing you fall) would appeal to voters.
Recently, looking back on my life from my autumnal perch, I've had reason to lament my youthful lack of diligence. I was capable of hard work, but in relatively short bursts. Then, I lacked the monomania usually associated with great achievement. Instead, I spread my energies across a variety of fields.
Then, I suffered from being a bit too smart for my own good. Intellectual understanding coming to me easily, I never had to work much in that regard. I never got in the habit of digging into a subject, of sweating over it.
As doors open for beautiful women simply because they are beautiful, certain subjects opened "too easily" for me.
As if making up for lost time, paradoxically on "retiring" here in San Miguel, I finally began to apply myself in earnest... to publishing, starting with a calendar of events.
This niche was open because our dearly departed weekly newspaper, Atención's one major fault was that their deadline was a full 10 days before it was printed. This was especially problematic when it came to their event calendar.
You can understand how a large publication, such as Atención, might need ten days to "get to print." But, with all that they still might have saved their event calendar for last and shortened the deadline for submitting events to five or three or even two days.
But they didn't, and that 10-day gap gave Lokkal an advantage. A lot of events got announced in those 10 days after Atención was offline, after their deadline had passed and before their publication date. I updated my calendar until the moment it was published, so Lokkal always had a more complete event calendar. I tried hard not to miss any event. I'm still putting my obsessive compulsiveness to work for you.
Publishing is one field where I can claim some expertise. I've come back to it again and again, starting when I served as editor-in-chief of my prep school newspaper, soon to be magazine. Also back in Connecticut, while I was practicing naturopathic medicine, I published a dozen issues of a health-related newsprint magazine, going into 100s of thousands of copies.
Publishing on paper is a dying art, but I understand it well. The costs of printing, the paper and the distribution are now prohibitive. The sad truth is that if during the pandemic its publisher had reduced the size of Atención, printing 28 instead of 68 pages, we'd still have the grand old lady with us today. But the publisher wasn't a publisher. And neither was its editor much of an editor.
That editor has started a new quarterly publication here in SMA. After looking, for months, for its first issue, I was recently able to lay my hands on its second issue.
Atención was infamous for its poor English: "Talk like that we don't." This I attributed to the pressure of publishing 68 (or more) pages every week. But the new quarterly has the same bad English... even worse.
Most of Atención's articles were about events. When the pandemic came, and there were no events, thus reducing Atención's copy, they started publishing articles about national and international matters, thus losing their home-town market. This new quarterly has started out publishing a significant number of articles on the world situation.
However you feel about Trump and war and Israel, all subjects covered repeatedly in the new quarterly, it's extremely unlikely that you are getting your opinions on world affairs from a free local magazine you pick up on the corner... not from this one anyway.
And that's another huge fault: where can you pick it up? Atencion worked for advertisers because it was everywhere, every week. Most of you have no idea of the name of this new quarterly, because you have never seen it on any counter in any store. The new quarterly (and another monthly paper which shall also go unnamed), printed entirely in four colors, requires an expensive grade of paper, which means that they aren't printing very many copies. Beautiful women don't have to be brilliant conversationalists to get attention. Similarly, this new quarterly is attractive, as long as you don't sit down and actually read the articles.
Speaking of eye candy, when I was married, my wife became friends with a woman who was the mistress, and then (ending his marriage) the wife of a major industrialist. While they were sitting in a restaurant together, a woman at the next table, noticing the size of the diamond on this wealthy woman's finger, asked her table companion if she thought it was real. Appraising the situation, the wealthy woman and her stone, her table companion confidently assured her that it was.
I don't have the expertise to trade commodities, or to gamble on elections. But I'm sure that I can separate the losers from the winners when it comes to publishing. I don't know how to judge the genuineness of diamond rings, but I'm betting that, when it comes to the home-town press, authenticity will come in first place. And as things stand, I'm already way ahead of the game.
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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.
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