effects.........................

I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves . . . It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself.  It can be forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed.

      People with the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite that the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly.  He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

ground rules.................

 Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.

-Michael Wade

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

Ron Wood.......I've Got My Own Album To Do album

 

Been in the..........................

................real estate brokerage business for a long time.  I'm not sure they've thought this through:

The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more. . . .

Although it’s unclear what the future of the housing market will look like, Miller said he expected homebuying to pick up somewhat as costs fall dramatically for homebuyers.

Back story here.

Most pundits seemed to think that low interest rates helped the buyers.  Strikes us that low interest rates actually helped the sellers.   

Most buyers around here seem to think mostly in terms of their monthly mortgage payment.  A monthly payment of $2,000 will amortize a $360,000 mortgage at 3% interest over twenty years.   At 6% interest, that payment will only support a mortgage $280,000.

In a hot and competitive real estate market, which much of the country has experienced lately (mostly because of a shortage of supply of housing), who do you think reaps the reward of the extra $80,000 available mortgage financing that 3% interest provided?  Why do you think housing prices got so high so quickly?  You are kidding yourself if you don't think that part of the housing "affordability" problem was caused by ten years of 3% mortgage money.  When it comes to real estate, low interest rates are inflationary, and that favors sellers.

A similar thing will likely happen with the real estate commission issue.  If commissions fall, in a hot and competitive market, the buyer will not be seeing the benefit.  It will likely go to the seller.  All other things being equal, the buyer working with a broker who will work for a reduced fee, can now afford to offer more.  If the supply problem ever gets fixed and a "buyers' market" emerges, then it might be different.  In the meanwhile, two people can't save the same reduction in fees. (This assumes there will actually be a reduction in fees).  It will benefit either the buyer or the seller.  In a "sellers market," bet on the seller.

Time will tell, but my bet is that pundits thinking changing the long-established commission structure will help buyers, in what is still a "sellers' market," are fooling themselves - and the public.

Prickly..........................

When in doubt
let nature be your guide.

Specifically, cactuses

Be still.
Stay hydrated.
Shelter owls.
Stab your predators.

It's that easy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

image via

The game.........................

  The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.

-Michael Munger,  Is Capitalism Sustainable?

the chess-board.................

 The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.  He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.  He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.  If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

About those plans................

      Adams would proudly claim that he never troubled himself with plans for his future.  All evidence corroborates that approach, one not everyone could afford.

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

certain risks...............

 I may know who and what I am.  I cannot know in advance who or what I could become.  There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

not your friends...........................

 They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life. It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends.

-William Ewart Gladstone, 1871

such a thing as truth..........

 Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."

-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

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

The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band.....the debut album

 

 

What is something you want, but you haven't asked for?

-James Clear

Out walking.......................

 When the cacophony of market doom reaches ear-piercing levels, the best remedy is to go outside and take a walk—by yourself.

-Tony Isola, from here

on being questioned.........................

 In the last resort, man should not ask, "What is the meaning of my life?" but should realize that he himself is being questioned."

-Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy

the constitutive uncertainty................

 Fatih is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

The new math..................................

Sometimes, the best addition to our lives is actually subtraction.

1,408...................................

 

........................................and counting!

From Chris Lynch's..............................

..........................................latest substack:

 Analysis true! Good life advice for avoiding problems and unworthy people...

Letting go......................................

 

...............................................for dear life.

Taking a stab.................................

 ...................at understanding the electorate.

Motivation..........................

 ..........................................in a crazy world.

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

Rory Gallagher......................... Irish Tour '74 album

 

Past and present.................

. . . they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.

-Bari Weiss, from here

Constructive..........................

 

Having a calm mind that is focused on the outcome is our greatest asset when we are in conflict at workplace.

-Tanmay Vora, from this post

Important facts..............................

15.  Two 12-inch pizzas have less pizza than one 18-inch pizza.

-more fun here              math here

Not to say......................

...........................that paper cuts don't hurt:

 1. Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut.

becoming........................

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

art via

stumped.....................

 I’ve always been stumped by people’s naivety, or willingness to accept for others what they themselves would never abide.

-Joel Hirst, from here

One can only hope...................

 North America may suffer from some of the world’s poorest political leadership. Yet it seems destined to remain the wealthiest, most dominant place on Earth.

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Fun on the dance floor................

Led Zeppelin........................Boogie with Stu

 

thanks Ray

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

Blind Connie Williams/Philadelphia Street Singer album

 

Vantage points....................

 What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

20 investing lessons.....................

..........................from twenty years:

 2. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee investment success. Warren Buffett once wrote, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”

I’ve met so many highly educated individuals who are terrible investors. They can’t control their emotions because their academic pedigree makes them overconfident in their abilities.

Emotional intelligence is the true sign of investment smarts.

The unknowable future.........

 Are stock prices too high? I don’t know, and neither do you. I am too much of an Efficient Markets adherent to believe otherwise. Though, I am also Schumpeterian. So, yeah, we just may be in a new AI-powered economy where we will be much more productive, and the firms best poised to make money off this are worth a lot—and will be worth much more than what they are now. But until we figure many things out, and that could take decades (possibly many decades), there will be some froth along the way. We will make big bets on the wrong horses. Or some companies that seem poised for greatness will falter after a while. Or companies that seem unstoppable now may not exist then. Who the winners will be and what winning even looks like is unknowable right now.

-Allison Schrager

deeply..................

      To feel deeply is dangerous.

      To do anything else is a tragedy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

deep thoughts about deep thoughts.............

       I had come to grad school as a nontraditional student, older than my peers, leaving my job at a real estate development business to pursue a life of the mind.  I had failed as a student when I first went to college directly after high school, but when I returned in my twenties, I had a much different level of focus and commitment.  Unlike my first brush with higher education, I knew why I wanted to be there.

     When I reached my master's program, I took academia (and myself) very seriously.  I wrote dense essays about John Milton's Paradise Lost.  I attended conferences on pedagogy.  I thought deep thoughts about deep thoughts, and I was eager to tell you about them.  I used words like "epistemologies" before breakfast, without a hint of irony.

     My mental health struggles, my insomnia, and my fear of fully committing myself lest I prove my best wasn't enough meant I missed class fairly often, but I was still on the path to being respectable.  I was becoming a scholar.  A writer. A professor.  Somebody who left his small rustbelt town to do smart things with smart people.  I didn't have time for frivolous women and their frivolous art doodles.

     I was an idiot.

-Jarod K. Anderson

Recommended...................

      The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.  More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Live (the ancient art of stoic joy)

Choices.........................

 When the choice is between effective and smooth, choose effective.

-Michael Wade

A coming attraction.......................

 ..................Lots of hype in our part of the world about the coming (April 8th) total solar eclipse.  One of my favorite memories about total solar eclipses was my junior high school reading of Mark Twain's tale, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, wherein our hero, Hank Morgan, outwits Merlin and King Arthur.

image via

Surrender.................................

 

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

C. S. Lewis, from his 1939 sermon, Learning In War-time

Fun with mergers and acquisitions..........

 

All of these are big serious companies with good lawyers who have written these contracts before. Chevron’s proposed acquisition of Hess is as straightforward as can be, a completely standard all-stock reverse triangular merger; there is no weird structuring here to either get around or trigger the right of first refusal. It’s a simple question: Does the right of first refusal apply to a normal merger of Hess? Exxon seems confident that it does; Chevron and Hess seem confident that it does not.

Weird stuff. I obviously cannot tell you who is right. The language of the Stabroek joint operating agreement is not public, and neither is the arbitration filing, so I don’t know what the contract says, and even if I did I probably wouldn’t be sure what it means. The people who wrote it aren’t sure!

-Matt Levine

Can we please stop..............................

 ..............................this time change thing?

redefinitions..................

 We need to redefine "problems" into opportunities.

Problems are an opportunity to create value.
Problems are an opportunity to strengthen relationships.
Problems are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from others.

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

-Farnam Street, from here