Opening paragraphs............

      The blackest nighttime sky was suddenly shot through with powerful bolts of lightning that brightened the heavens and thundered like a lion making its presence known.  While the violent electrical thunderstorm raged on, displaying the undisputed power and mystery of nature, a young mother labored in a small, one-window room with wood-planked flooring to birth a child who would be called Nikola.  As she shook the bed, writhing in pain and joy, gale-force winds mercilessly battered manmade structures outside, while the midwife beside her was so frightened by the moment that she nervously said, "He'll be the child of the storm."  His mother responded insistently, "No, of light." (History suggests they were both correct, as the life of Nikola Tesla would prove to ride the storm of bipolar disorder while lighting the world both literally and figuratively with his genius.)

-Marko Perko and Stephen M. Stahl, Tesla: His Tremendous and Troubled Life

Always bet on the optimist...........

 more fun here

Talk about valuable real estate...........

 more fun here

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

At the cinema........Liza Minnelli & Joel Grey in Cabaret

 

Chris Lynch...........................

 .................explains himself.  From a March 17, 2004 post, in like his second week of blogging.

Believe it or not........................

 ..................I've never read a book written by James Patterson.  That may change soon:

He insists that parents adopt an iron law: “We read in our house.”

Constantly......................

 via

The risk of undercharging................

 At a time when everyone is wondering about the "cost" of things, it may help to remind yourself that what you get paid is a reflection of what you've done to be WORTH IT! This doesn't mean pulling a price randomly out of thin air. Nor does it mean only charging what "others" charge, either. That's because what YOU DID and what YOU DO to be worth it is YOURS ALONE.

-Matthew Ferrara, the story of how he learned not to undercharge for his services may be found here

expectations.............................

      But this breathtaking increase in the money supply did not, at least immediately, set off inflation.  For while inflation is a monetary phenomenon, it is also a psychological one: when the expectation of inflation becomes widespread, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

     That prophecy was fulfilled in 2021.  With the Biden administration continuing pandemic relief, which discouraged many for seeking work, and restricting oil and gas production, inflation set in.   Supply chain issues also contributed.

     By December 2021, consumer prices were up seven percent on an annual basis, the highest in 40 years, while producer prices were up 9.6 percent, the highest since that statistic has been compiled.  And the expectation of further inflation is now deeply embedded in the economy.

     Regardless of this, the Biden administration is still pushing hard for its "Build Back Better" plan, which would add at least another $5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.  And President Biden has airily said that "Milton Friedman is no longer in charge."

     But unfortunately for the Biden presidency—and for the American people—Milton Friedman was right.  Create too much money and you get inflation.  We are witnessing the proof of that right now.

-John Steele Gordon, as he concludes this essay

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Us folk involved...................

 ..........in the business of building things will take our blessings wherever we can find them.

 via

Pirate stories.................

 .................are worth reading.  Read, and thoroughly enjoyed, the last two of these.  The first one is on-order.  Might suggest adding this one to the list:

Wisdom.................

 The most critical component of your retirement plan is how you feel about yourself, not the size of your portfolio.

-Tony Isola, from here

surprise and mystery....................

 So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.

-Trish Harrison Warren via David Kanigan

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

5th Dimension...(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep At All

The hopeful birth.........................

 ................of a subdivision:  Episode 23:

We have had a rainy spring.  Hard to put pipe in the ground when it is soaking wet.  Having said that, progress is being made.  The sanitary sewer main lines have been installed and we are about halfway through the installation of the storm sewer system.  Nothing wrong here that a few dry weeks won't cure.

Preparing the ground for a storm structure

Work completed about an hour ago

Lifting the storm structure

Attention to detail: cleaning mud off the bottom of the structure

Put it right about there

Right where it belongs

D. R. Horton building out the 49 first phase lots

customers.................

      The reach and power of Giannini's branch banking empire in California was extraordinary, beyond the comprehension of people living outside the state.  "I still can't realize that in forty years a man has built something out here that compels the awe—that's the right word, awe—of all New York," said an East Coast financial writer on his first trip to San Francisco in the late 1940s.  With 504 branches and four million individual customers, Bank of America held the savings deposits of one out of every three Californians, or 40 percent of the state's total bank deposits. . . .

      Giannini always remained the bank's most energetic booster.  He would go to extremes to attract new depositors and to keep them as customers.  He did this partly to reaffirm Bank of America's relentlessly promoted images as a "people's bank" and  partly out of his own fierce competitive urge; there was no such thing as an unimportant customer.  "When you sell people," he was fond of saying, "keep them sold."

      As successful as Giannini was, nothing generated more public comment than his disregard for his own wealth.  He saw no point in accumulating money or in surrounding himself with the signs of material success.  The home in which he lived until the end of his life was the one he had purchased when he was selling fruits and vegetables on the San Francisco waterfront. The wardrobe of the man whom Fortune would include in its Hall of Fame of America's ten greatest businessmen consisted of four off-the-racks suits, three pairs of shoes, and a handful of shirts and ties.  "My hardest job," he said on one occasion, "was to keep from becoming a millionaire."

Felice A. Bonadio, A. P. Giannini: Banker of America

a common effort....................

      The socialist Robert Nisbet once lamented that no great state can really long endure without a common effort to create unity and a collective belief that it is exceptional or at least better than the alternative: "No government can hope to achieve anything of a political, social, and economic character that rises much above the level of a written statute unless there is present a sense of veneration for that government that is but another way of expressing patriotism."  In other words, a state that does not exalt common citizenship itself loses credibility.  Cynical citizens see no need to heed its rules.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen

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

On the television............David Carradine in Kung Fu

 

Steady as she goes...............

 Hard money in the long run is more sustainable than easy money in the short run.

-Ben Carlson, as he looks to John Candy as an investing role model

Wisdom............................

 ...........................follow the three R's.

mind-body learning..............

       Tightly constrained by risk-averse, health-and-safety-obsessed society, many children are unable to light fires, paddle canoes, make shelters, use knives or cope with darkness.  Further, children are discouraged from acts of physical courage and this is more serious than it appears, for we learn with our bodies as well as our minds—or rather we learn with the mind-body—and when we see our physical selves modelling bravery, our sense of moral courage, political courage, emotional courage or intellectual courage is heightened.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

The adventure-monitor creeps up .......

      The risk-averse society denies the very idea of freedom's role, it stops chance throwing a wild card, it kills the free play of luck.  The adventure-monitor creeps up. pouring cold water on every fire-pit, banning people from bringing home-made cakes to school fetes.  In the otherwise important UNICEF report into childhood well-being in 2007, the authors comment that health and safety "did not feature highly in children's priorities".  Who knew?

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

heart...........................

 When your heart is filled with gratitude for what you do have, your head isn't nearly so worried about what you don't.

-Douglas Pagels

fund-raising...............

      War is, by far, the most expensive of all government operations.  And both the Confederate and United States governments faced unprecedented financial stresses in funding the Civil War.  How each of them met the challenge helped determine, in no small way, the outcome of the war.

     Governments have only three ways to fund operations.  They can tax, they can borrow, and they can print.  Both governments did all three, but the particular mix was very different.  The northern states had a much more advanced economy and a well-established financial system in place.  As a result, the U. S. was able to throw much of the cost of the war onto the future.  In 1860, the national debt had stood at $64 million.  By 1866, it was at $2.7 billion, and about five percent of the North's population has invested in federal bonds.  So the North was able to raise two-thirds of its revenues by borrowing. . . .

     The South had to meet fully 50 percent of its revenue by printing money.  State and City governments also printed money.  And because the South lacked good paper mills and state-of-the-art printing facilities, counterfeiting flourished.  Altogether, the South printed about $1.5 billion in that money, three times as much as the North, despite having only twelve percent of the circulating currency before the war and 21 percent of banking assets.

     The result was catastrophic inflation.  Prices rose 700 percent in the South in just the first two years of the war.  As the war continued, the inflationary spiral deepened and the southern economy began to spin out of control.  Living standards fell sharply while hoarding, shortages, and black markets spread, eroding popular support for the war.

-John Steele Gordon, from his essay Inflation in the United States

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

At the cinema.....................................The Godfather

 

George gives a spelling lesson....

 via

a special term.................

      Money is just another commodity, no different from petroleum, pork bellies, or pig iron.  So money, like all commodities, can rise and fall in price, depending on supply and demand.  But because money is, by definition, the one commodity that is universally accepted in exchange for every other commodity, we have a special term for a fall in the price of money:  we call it inflation.  As the price of money falls, the price of every other commodity must go up.

     And what causes the price of money to fall?  The answer is very simple: an increase in the supply of money relative to other goods and services.

-John Steele Gordon,  from his essay, Inflation in the United States

a work-in-progress............

      Happiness comes from solving problems.  The keyword here is "solving."  If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable.  If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable.  The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

     To be happy we need something to solve.  Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher.  It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house.  You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job—or even a book, for that matter.

     Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today's problems will lay the foundations for tomorrow's problems, and so on.  True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

-Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

melting-pot ethos......

      America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history's few exceptions.  The ultimate rationale of America's unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.  Eventually, most who were willing to give up their prior identities and assume a new American persona were accepted as Americans.  The United States has always cherished its universally applicable melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum—of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage in the manner that diverse colonies united to become one nation.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  The Dying Citizen

On finding out........................

 We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal:  An Earthly Cosmology

conceptually malevolent................

      This is why the risk-averse attitude of modernity is not only annoying but conceptually malevolent.  It works against the correct instinct children have that they must find a working relationship with chance and risk . . .

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

In the background.................

The Beach Boys..........................Endless Summer

 

Traits for successful investing............

 In fact, most of Buffett’s pithy aphorisms boil down to the same basic message: “Just be sensible.”

This may be easier said than done.

-from this HumbleDollar post

Unfortunately.............................

 Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill. 

-Morgan Housel, from this post