Saturday, March 28, 2020
this triple trend...........................
The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took twelve black-and-white images, and cost over $10,000. Today, the average camera that comes with the average smartphone shows a thousand-fold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution over Sasson's model. And these cameras are everywhere. In cars, drones, phones, satellites, and such, and with an image resolution that's downright spooky. Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range. Drones shrink that to a centimeter. But the LIDAR sensors atom autonomous cars capture just about everything—gathering 1.3 million data points per second.
We see this triple trend of decreasing size and cost, and increasing performance everywhere. The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing fifty-three points and costing $119,900. By 2010, it had shrunk to a $5 chip small enough to sit on your finger. The "inertial measurement unit" that guided our early rockets is another example. In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device. Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.
-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
Fifty years ago...................
James Taylor............................................................Country Road
On the vision thing........................
Intellectuals are often shortsighted, failing to see what is before their very nose. Their object is to obscure the obvious and to make complex the simple, so that they are then needed to lead humanity away from its ignorance and stupidity. With the inexorable rise of tertiary education, we have more intellectuals than ever before, and yet final enlightenment seems as elusive as ever. Man remains a problem-creating animal.
-Theodore Dalrymple, as he begins this post
via
Opportunities arising................
Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found that the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
Over the next decade, we'll see these kinds of opportunities arise in dozens of industries. As a result, if the internet is our benchmark, more wealth could be created over the next ten years than was over the previous century.
-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
Fun with the language...............
Having beers with Shakespeare would be extraordinary.
- Sir Nathaniel. I praise God for you, sir: your reasons
- at dinner have been sharp and sententious;
- pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection,
- audacious without impudency, learned without opinion,
- and strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam
- day with a companion of the king's, who is intituled, nomi-
- nated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.
- Holofernes. Novi hominem tanquam te: his humour
- is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed,
- his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general
- behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is
- too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it
- were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.
- Sir Nathaniel. A most singular and choice epithet.
-William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost: Act Five, Scene 1
thrasonical is a new one for me. According to our friends at Dictionary.com it means boastful; vainglorious.
frictionless................................
Instead of starting big and then flaring out with nothing to show for it other than time and energy wasted, to really get essential things done we need to start small and build momentum. Then we can use that momentum to work toward the next win, and the next one an so on until we have a significant breakthrough—and when we do, our progress will have become so frictionless and effortless that the breakthrough will seem like an overnight success. As former Stanford professor and educator Henry B. Eyring has written, "My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve: the best place to look is for small changes we could make in the things we do often. There is power in steadiness and repetition."
-`Greg McKeown, essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Friday, March 27, 2020
On angriness.....................
We typically feel so much guilt about anger that we find it necessary to make the object of our anger "wrong" so that we can say our anger is "justified." Few are the persons who can take responsibility for their own anger and just say, "I am angry because I am full of angriness."
-David R. Hawkins, from Letting Go: The Pathway Of Surrender
It's likely fallen off the cliff here of late, but......
The Gross Domestic Product. So, what is it really? Well, that's easy you say: the GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.
To which Bastiat would respond: You've overlooked a huge part of the picture. Community service, clean air, free refills on the house — not of these things make the GDP an iota bigger. If a businesswoman marries her cleaner, the GDP dips when her hubby trades his job for unpaid housework. Or take Wikipedia. Supported by investments of time rather than money, it has left the old Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust — and taken the GDP down a few notches in the process.
-Rutger Bregman, Utopia For Realists: How We Can Build The Idea World
The type of person...............
.......................................it would be fun to have beers with:
Clarke had an expanding brain that functioned like an accordion. He sucked in ideas, mixed them together and then expelled them as something altogether more melodious. Where most people saw problems, he saw only solutions.
-Giles Milton describing Cecil "Nobby" Clarke in Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
The most important step.......
….......….in becoming a successful real estate investor is surviving the ownership of the first investment property. As we tell all of our prospective new investors, life its ownself can be messy at times, and that goes double (or triple) when dealing with property and tenants. Acceptance of that reality is an important step in clearing the way to success.
Apparently (ten years of a bull market notwithstanding) the same thing is true for investing in the stock market:
Risk and reward are attached at the hip. You can’t expect to earn higher returns if you aren’t willing to accept occasional losses and volatility.
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Verse..........................
God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us;
2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.
3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee.
4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth.
5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee.
6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us.
7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
-Psalm 67, The Holy Bible, King James Version
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
