.........................is widely available:
More information led to a more functional market for both suppliers and consumers. Profits increased and consumers experienced far less volatility in the price of the fish they were eating. Plus there were fewer fish going to waste.
If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life.
I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer. My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots. William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .
Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people. I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer. I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor. By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.
Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers. Anyway, writing is not a competition to me. Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller. I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.
-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
The alternative is to create a culture around taking responsibility instead. Most organizations are happy to offer responsibility to anyone willing to take it, but we all need to learn to do a better job of encouraging leadership and positive action, regardless of title or org chart tier.
And the companion to taking responsibility is relentlessly giving away credit. When we offer others a chance to shine, they're more likely to connect, to enroll in the journey, and to join the next chance they have to do so.
-Seth Godin, The Song of Significance
If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.
In London, meanwhile, John Adams composed his best-known work, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, the sole piece of writing he finished that is longer than an essay. . . .
In this rambling constitutional study, Adams surveyed all sorts of governments in the ancient and modern worlds, and concluded, as others did, that the most effective and sustainable form is one that is "a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, extolled by Polybius." That ancient Greek historian had tired in his work to explain the rapid rise of the Roman Republic. Polybius wrote that he intended to analyze how "it came about that nearly the whole world fell under the power of Rome in somewhat less than fifty-three years."
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
-Bill W.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.
-Arthur Conan Doyle
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense, and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Intellect
We live in a time of ideological exhaustion. . . . Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine.
-Martin Gurri, from here
The men who live in the democratic ages upon which we are entering have naturally a taste for independence; they are naturally impatient of regulation, and they are wearied by the permanence even of the condition they themselves prefer. They are fond of power, but they are prone to despise and hate those who wield it, and they easily elude its grasp by their own mobility and insignificance.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter VII (1840)
We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world. The fate of nations has turned on their ability to harness computing power. Globalization as we know it wouldn't exist without the trade in semiconductors and the electronic products they make possible. America's military primacy stems largely from its ability to apply chips to military uses. Asia's tremendous rise over the past half century has been built on a foundation of silicon as its growing economies have come to specialize in fabricating chips and assembling the computers and smartphones that these integrated circuits make possible.
-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Parents, teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors bombarded me with the same question: "What are you going to do with your life?" I didn't even want to think about that when I was fourteen. My teachers called me a daydreamer. They would write comments on my report card like, "He seems to live in a fantasy world and prefers that to paying serious attention to serious subject matters that will prepare him for life."
The life they were so hell-bent on preparing me for bored the living shit out of me. It seemed way too serious. I saw more meaning in the mysteries of the ocean and the planets than in theology or religion. I was too busy figuring out ways to skip school, go diving, and get laid. My heroes were not presidents, they were pirates. Emerging from adolescence with a healthy "lack of respect for the proper authorities," and a head full of romanticism and hero worship, I was able to come up with an answer.
Q. What are you going to do with your life?
A. Live a pretty interesting one.
-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
........................................great quotes.
If this bus isn't going where you want to go, today is a great time to get off.
Watching all this, Orwell arrived at some conclusions that clashed with leftist conventions of the era. At a time when leftist solidarity was considered mandatory, the right thing to do, Orwell began to harbor suspicions. Observing the fighting in Barcelona between different antifascist factions, he noted, "You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police."
In effect, the events in Barcelona forced him to examine the left as he once earlier had scrutinized imperialism and capitalism. He concluded, "The Communist Party, with Soviet Russia, had thrown its weight against the revolution." It was determined to systematically wipe out the anticommunist parts of the left—first POUM, then the anarchists, and then socialists.
But to say this in public was a form of modern heresy. Orwell realized, with shock, that the left-wing newspapers did not report the situation accurately, and did not want to. Rather, they willingly accepted lies. "One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right," he wrote. This set him on his life's work, to push continually to establish the facts, no matter how difficult or unpopular that might be.
-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
.....................I grew up in a home like this.
Apparently people are starting to notice that it makes a difference. For instance, this book review, or this column review. For a different take, check this blog post. All I know is I do feel privileged.
As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was "fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue." The moment had come, he continues, to consider whether "the vices could, through wise contrivance, be made to do the work of virtues." Thinking through this apparent paradox would become the specialty of James Madison. . . .
Not only was the structure of the United States flawed, but so was the classical conception behind it, he argued. The time had come to accept that "all civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—Rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property etc etc" But if "different interests and factions" were inevitable, then faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural. What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.
-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic
My trade and my art is living.
-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6
If it is someone else's problem, you probably don't have the solution.
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution's design to protect us and help us thrive. But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being. We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world. If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous, and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive. Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.
-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
I'm so pleased that Yeats
never got off his stilts
though I have only one.
Midday silence is different
from nighttime silence.
I can't tell you how.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
With students, perhaps even Rumi, taking notes, he explained, "You are your own pearl . . . If you don't know anything else, but know yourself, then you are a scholar and a mystic. If you don't know yourself, then all the science and knowledge that you possess is useless."
-Brad Gooch, as excerpted from Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love
We live in culture-war hell. The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can't stand. In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose. And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to "the other side" at all is to admit defeat. Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they're so extreme as to be ridiculous. They'll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right.
I promise: you don't have to do that.
Fredrik DeBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase "I see what you mean" is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can't see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts. It's nuts in several different dimensions all at once. Setting aside the unfortunate conflations inherent in the concept of ableism, which aggregates together conditions that have no business being aggregated together, this prohibition insults blind people, pretends to misunderstand the way language works, and is fundamentally unserious. It insults blind people and those with reduced vision because it assumes that they are incredibly sensitive and fragile, that if they come into contact with a perfectly common turn of phrase they've encountered their whole lives, they will be broken by it. As is true of so many contemporary progressive norms, this prohibition belittles and condescends to the very people it ostensibly honors. I have a disability myself, a mental illness. I am not hurt of offended by people using the word "crazy," because I am not so fragile as that and because I know how language works.
-Fredrik DeBoer, How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
The only persons who are really at leisure are those who devoted themselves to philosophy: and they alone really live: for they do not merely enjoy their own lifetime, but they annex every century to their own: all the years which have passed before them belong to them. Unless we are the most ungrateful creatures in the world, we shall regard these noblest of men, the founders of divine schools of thought, as having been born for us, and having prepared life for us: we are led by the labour of others to behold most beautiful things which have been brought out of darkness into light; we are not shut out from any period, we can make our way into every subject, and, if only we can summon up sufficient strength of mind to overstep the narrow limit of human weakness, we have a vast extent of time wherein to disport ourselves: we may argue with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, out-herod it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to commune with every age, why do we not abstract ourselves from our own petty fleeting span of time, and give ourselves up with our whole mind ot what is vast, what is eternal, what we share with better men than ourselves?
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life
We're curious creatures, aren't we? We are very good at bucking each other up. Your friend falls down; you give them a hand up, tell them it's going to be okay. How many of us do that for ourselves?
-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections On A Life Of Awe And Wonder
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even ok if I don't paragraph my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
. . . learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
-from this Farnum Street post
Edison had come to despise government bureaucrats, seeing them as a blight on democracy. In his disgust he had turned down a medal for his defense work, arguing that he deserved it no more than any other member of the Naval Consulting Board. He said he had lost interest in weapons of war—not to mention respect for the patent and copyright clause of the U. S. Constitution, "and the other 27,946 books filled with laws."
-Edmund Morris, Edison
Go to bed on time. Eat healthy food. Meditate.
Skewer your guilt on a red-hot poker and burn it to ash.The way I think of Return on Hassle is with a simple life value that drives countless decisions for our family.
We value simplicity over complexity… even if it means leaving money on the table.
At seventy-three, with his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. "My line of sorrows," he wrote, "lies in the realm of technical science." He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the "molecular concussions" of music.
-Edmund Morris, Edison
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.
-Helen Garner, from here
A few years ago, I decided I would try to change my mind about something at least once a month – and that turned out to be way too easy.
I started with politics – we are a polarized nation and I’ve got plenty of opinions about why the other side’s policies are so awful. But if the US is split close to 50/50 on most of these issues, I can’t possibly believe that 160 million people are dead wrong. Or stupid. Or misguided.
I needed to approach my beliefs the way I did when I was debating in high school. I had to prepare myself to be able to articulate and defend a certain side of an argument, but I had to do so without knowing until right before the debate which side I would need to argue for.
The more I did this, the more I realized how shallow so many of my opinions were . . .
-Marc Randolph, from here
.................by reading Morgan Housel:
The proper financial mindset is to be scared enough to save for the short run and brave enough to invest for the long run.
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