"I have confirmed that 30% of the public can’t identify a joke without the help of a service animal."
-Scott Adams, taken out of context here
The Dog:
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Got to get The Dog one of those vests.....
"I have confirmed that 30% of the public can’t identify a joke without the help of a service animal."
-Scott Adams, taken out of context here
The Dog:
It is a Rippington kind of afternoon...........
The Rippingtons..........................................Led Here By An Eagle
Thursday, June 29, 2017
The Law of Unintended Consequences......
.......................................never rests (although one wonders from time to time if the consequences were truly unintended):
The true beneficiaries of Silicon Valley’s new minimum wage laws are going to be found in the corporate offices of the tech giants who create robots and the venture capitalists who invest in them rather than among the growing number of Californians trapped in the low-paid labor market.
-Walter Russell Mead, as lifted from here
A sign for our times..................
-taken from this Tony Isola post connecting the world of investing with Emerson's essay, "Compensation."
On the investigation of pleasure............
Pleasure is the structure of society. From childhood until death we are secretly, cunningly or obviously pursuing pleasure. So whatever form our pleasure is, I think we should be very clear about it because it is going to guide and shape our lives. It is therefore important for each one of us to investigate closely, hesitantly and delicately this question of pleasure, for to find pleasure, and then nourish and sustain it, is a basic demand of life and without it existence becomes dull, stupid, lonely, and meaningless.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti, as excerpted from Freedom from the Known
The importance of the process........
"Intelligent investors understand that a good process has very little to do with short-run outcomes but quality decisions give you a high probability of success over the long-run."
-Ben Carlson, concluding this post
On duty...................................
Some philosophers - not necessarily the ablest - are impressive through their quality of intellectual honesty. Of these a very good example was Henry Sidgwick, who was my teacher in ethics. In his youth fellowships at Cambridge were only open to those who would sign the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Years after he had signed them, he developed doubts, and, though not expected to affirm that his beliefs remained unchanged, decided that it was his duty to resign. This action hastened the change in the law which put an end to the old theological restrictions. As a teacher, he showed the same honesty, and considered objections by pupils as courteously and carefully as if they had been made by colleagues. This made his teaching more fruitful than that of many abler men.
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay, Eminent Men I Have Know, as found here
On mis-estimation.....................
"Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school."
Life its ownself..........................
"As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists."
-Albert Einstein
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Gone, but not forgotten.....................
Burl Ives...................................................Ghost Riders In The Sky
#18 on this list
McArdle looks at......................
....................................................Seattle's minimum wage increases, and the studies that have followed:
"That’s the danger of striking out for uncharted territory; sometimes, you end up where there be dragons."
-full post here
Fifty years ago.......................
The Rolling Stones.....................................................Complicated
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
You'd think they were capitalists or something....
"Google has come up with many innovative products and services that have made a difference to our lives. That's a good thing. But Google's strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn't just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors."
-borrowed from this Coyote Blog post about the EU fining Google more euros than I could count.
A few quotes.....................
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
-Mark Twain
"I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything.”
-George Harrison
“Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.”
-Louis L'Amour
“A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.”
-Dave Barry
“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.”
-Steve Martin
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
-C.G. Jung
“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”
-Albert Camus
Fifty years ago..........................
Otis Redding...............................................................Satisfaction
Monday, June 26, 2017
Reach out.....................................
Sam & Dave.........................................Hold On, I'm Coming
Self-knowledge............................
“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.”
-Thucydides
Not your typical...............................
.............................................................graduation advice:
Don’t pretend you know what you’re doing. No one will believe it. Instead show humility and ask for lots of help. Because every recent grad looks fresh and full of potential and people will want to help you because you remind them of them, when they were young and fresh and full of potential. If you act like you know what you’re doing, they can’t offer help.
-From this Penelope Trunk post
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Others.............................
For that which you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue, but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own virtue.
-Giordano Bruno
Thinking Jeboy might like this..............
Ryan Tennis........................................Till The Ghost Is Gone
Complexity.........................
................for the sake of complexity doesn't seem very productive:
"In London I am often asked to give talks about developments in the finance sector to a general audience. One question which routinely comes up is “what do people who work in the finance sector, in those large office blocks and in the City of London and Canary Wharf, actually do?” And the answer I give is that, to an extent that almost defies belief, what they do is trade with each other."
"When I was a schoolboy in Scotland in the 1960s, joining the Bank of Scotland or the Royal Bank of Scotland was a career for the boys in my class who were not going to get good enough grades to go to leading universities. Even when a few years later I began my teaching career at Oxford, careers in the City of London were mostly for undergraduates who were not academically distinguished but nevertheless socially polished and well-connected. All that has changed, and not altogether for the better, as was evident when the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland failed in 2008, after three centuries of prudent success, under the stewardship of able individuals with good degrees from the finest universities and business schools.
"Larry Summers, former president of Harvard and US Treasury Secretary, once observed that finance had once been the preserve of people whose primary skills were those of good companions at the 19th hole of the golf course, but had become the province of people with the sophisticated mathematical skills required to price complex derivatives.[10] Summers, with skills better adapted to solving differential equations than conviviality at the 19th hole, noted this shift with evident approval. I am not so sure."
-Quotes retrieved from this John Kay essay
On the collapse of transaction costs....
..............................and the coming "sharing economy":
Fifty years from now, people will look back on the turn of the century and wonder about us. They will wonder why we were so wasteful, so selfish. Why we had closets, garages, and rental storage units, all under lock and key so we could keep other people from using the stuff that we weren’t using, either.
-Mike Munger, as he opens this essay
Fifty years ago....................
Four Tops.................................Standing In The Shadow Of Love
I know a lot of people who will consider....
.............................................................this silly, but I don't:
"The wise know that the intellect can take one only so far, and beyond that, faith and belief must substitute for knowledge."
-David R. Hawkins
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
