Fifty years ago................................

The Eagles............................Peaceful Easy Feeling

 

Checking in...............................

 ..........................with Matt Ridley:

Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.

To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.

Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. 

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

. . .simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.

. . .time always erodes advantage

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.

American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.

"Social media is induced insanity.".....................

...............Checking in with Martin Gurri:

 On average, Americans spend 24 hours a week online—but a sizeable minority, 31%, exist almost entirely as virtual replicas of themselves. As with most addictions, the experience is at once compulsory and unbearable. The young internet was an adventure: users roamed the open spaces, surprised and delighted by what could be found there. Now, the flow of content resembles the ramblings of a disordered mind—except these are actual formulas, algorithms imposed by the inscrutable oligarchs of Silicon Valley.

Good advice......................

 No man, no bank, no business, should put itself into the grip of anyone else.

-A. P. Giannini

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