more fun here
Saturday, December 2, 2023
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Both...............................?
I wasn't sure what worried me more; skiing 1,700 kilometers or spending two months alone.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
thanks David
differently............................
The first step toward accepting that some things don't compute is realizing that the reason we have innovation and advancements is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from ours.
It would be great if the world worked in predictable, rational ways. But constant uncertainty, misunderstanding, and the inability to know what people will do next is the truth.
-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
The need....................
The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.
-attributed to Robert Greene
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
I consider myself..........................
.........................................privileged. I suspect Greg Mankiw would concur.
Ah, tradition.......................
Of course, I have noticed that what I think does not control the workings of the universe, doubtless a cosmic oversight of some sort. Still, it might be a good idea to think things through before undertaking them. Granted, this would be a break with tradition, but a little adventure spices up life.
A national treasure passes.................
................We were blessed to have him around for as long as we did.
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Checking in...........................
...............with Joseph Heller's Catch-22:
Insanity is contagious.
it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.
Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.
“From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”
a hierarchy..................................
I read about the duties of the Policy Review Board I am asked to join. It "serves a critical function in this work. The Board, consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences, functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work. Board members review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other material to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research." Prose like that gags, doesn't it? I mean, if leading citizens with different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences guarantee objectivity, they why isn't the United Nations objective? And are we sure we want to be free of ideological bias? Isn't a hierarchy of values valuable?
-William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary
One of the great tragedies.......................
On youth......................
The only quality of youth I covet is their health, not their age; life is wonderful, but the thought of reliving it is altogether repelling; spiritually, and even biologically, exhausting. When the character in Catch 22 said he intended to live forever or die trying, I sensed an exalted fatalism, nicely captured by the easy superficiality of the biological paradox.
-William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary
time passage.....................
General Dreedle had thrown open Colonel Cathcart's private skeet-shooting range to every officer and enlisted man in the group on combat duty. General Dreedle wanted his men to spend as much time out on the skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedules would allow. Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.
Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.
-Joseph Heller, Catch-22
In case I needed it.....................
...........................more proof I'm getting old. Younger investors and real estate agents are bemoaning the "high" current mortgage rates. For half of our career, we would have been thrilled with this sort of rate:
A little context:
Monday, November 27, 2023
Fifty years ago.............................
Uh-oh......................
As blogger Tim Urban describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what's easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done. . . .
Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it's an emotional management problem. When you procrastinate, you're not avoiding effort. You're avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later, though, you realize that you're also avoiding getting where you want to go.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Even though he is a .........................
.....................Wolverine fan (or maybe because he is one), Rob Firchau is a treasure.
A very good question.......................
............if the underlying assumptions are correct. While truly not having a clue, I'm going to hypothesize that governmental re-regulation plays a considerable role.
no guarantees.......................
"Best time of the day to be out there, though. You wake up before the sun, see a new day unfold right in front of you on the water. Ain't none of us guaranteed another hour of living, don't care who you are or how much you got. Might as well get up early and enjoy what time you got left, I say."
-David Baldacci, The Edge
a never-ending chain............
If you've relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you'd have been confused for a hundred years straight.
Economist Per Bylund once noted: "The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any)."
Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. . . .
The danger, one you see often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like—so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, "Why is this happening?" and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.
The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
-Morgan Housel, as excerpted from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
It's a subjective world...............
"Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others." This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not "What happened to this person?" or "What are the items on their resume?" Instead we should ask: "How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?" This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.
An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room then an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who's been trained as a security specialist.
-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Creationism...........................
Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People don't see the world with their eyes, they see it with their entire life.
Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person "constructionism." Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don't passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That's not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It's to say that we have only subjective access to it.
-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
The best you can do............
Unfortunately, there are many variables outside of your control when it comes to investing.
You can’t control the timing or magnitude of returns the markets offer. You also don’t control interest rates or inflation or economic growth or tax rates or the labor market or the actions of the Fed and politicians.
Life would be easier if you did but no one said life is easy.
The best you can do is focus on what you can control — your behavior, your savings rate, your asset allocation, your costs, your time horizon — and play the hand you’re dealt.
-Ben Carlson, as he concludes this post
Sunday, November 26, 2023
On this day in 1920...............
Something you don't see everyday..........
................someone praising social media:
Over the last six weeks, legacy media has given me literal Hamas propaganda, quite proudly, on the front page, over and over again. And now we all know it. Which makes the legacy media very mad indeed. The screaming and thrashing about social media are the old world’s death throes. Don’t get me wrong; social media is a mess. Twitter?! It’s vile. It’s full of offensive lies and just offensive reality. It’s vile because the world contains vile things and people are monstrous and weird. I see images I shouldn’t. I see hedgehogs who seem too tame (is that legal?). I see Susan Sarandon retweeting MAGA accounts in ways that trouble my sleep. And yet. I would take the mess over my apportioned journalism-school-Hamas-propaganda-oatmeal any day. God bless this mess. I’m grateful for social media.
types........................
Two days now Matt Sabre had been marshal of Painted Rock. Yet the job was not new to him, for he had been marshal before in other towns. And this town was no different. Even the faces were the same. It was strange, he thought, how little difference there was in people. When one traveled, got around to many towns, one soon realized there were just so many types, and one found them in every town. Names were different, and expressions, but it was like many casts playing the same roles in a drama. The parts remained the same, only the names of the cast had changed.
-Louis L'Amour, from his short story The Marshal of Painted Rock
by design........................
It seems to be our liberal political instincts that push us in this direction of centralizing authority: we distrust authority in the hands of individuals. With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
On thinking versus doing..............
. . . the twentieth century saw concerted efforts to separate thinking from doing. Those efforts achieved a good deal of success in ordering our economic life, and it is this success that perhaps explains the plausibility the distinction now enjoys. Yet to call this "success" is deeply perverse, for wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved, it has been responsible for the degradation of work.
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
part of the disciplinary process.....................
The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. . . . One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants become not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lears writes, "Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them a routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Opening paragraphs....................
Passenger train travel was not known to be particularly dangerous, especially in Europe where the machines soared like the wind on rigorously sculpted rails that translated to silky smooth rides. There were many departures a day between Geneva and Milan operated by several railway companies; one could travel early in the morning or later at night. The trains ran at a maximum speed of two hundred kilometers per hour, while their passengers napped, worked, binged shows on streaming platforms, or ate and drank in considerable comfort. This particular ride was a bullet-nosed silver Astoro tilt train operated by Trenitalia. None of the hundred-plus passengers was contemplating dying today.
Except for one.
-David Baldacci, The Edge
A Licking County tradition.......................
...............................on the Friday after Thanksgiving: the Christmas lighting of the County Courthouse:
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| Good looking building even without the lights |
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| Santa getting ready to hit the switch |
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| All lit up for the season |
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