John Sandford has never let me down.
Saturday, June 22, 2024
Friday, June 21, 2024
Fifty years ago....................................
Wisdom......................
.........................from our friend at Sippican Cottage:
Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.
Say it isn't so...................
Bad news: the universe is largely indifferent to your lucky socks.
-Eric Barker, from this post on "smart luck"
written in 1970.....................
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
in the grip............................
If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself, your conclusions will not be predictable.
An understatement...................
But I also think that it is important to separate out what is real from what is just a comforting lie that we tell ourselves.
-James O'Malley from his Music Just Changed Forever post
Thursday, June 20, 2024
Fifty years ago................................
The tough housing market...............
No matter how you slice it, the home building sector seems strangely slow given our population growth . . .
Brian Wesbury offers a pretty good take on why the housing market is so tight. He includes governmental hurdles as a major problem. Maybe. We think the major problem (that he fails to mention) is the wipe out of the small homebuilder - the company that would build 10-12 houses per year - after the 2008 meltdown. Those guys never recovered and/or aged out, and have not yet been replaced. We were so focused on sending all high school graduates to college, we forgot the importance of the building trades. There is still a screaming need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, drywallers, etc. The earning potential for those high school graduates entering those trades now seems significantly higher than college graduates with BA degrees. Just saying. As an honorable mention for housing problems, we should not forget the serious inflation of building material costs that the covid/broken-supply-chain-years brought us. Prices have moderated a bit, but not much. All in all, no quick fix to the housing problem is on the horizon.
The good life....................
In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.
Recommended..............................
This one patiently sat in the bookcase for about twenty years, waiting for its turn. Worth the wait.
lottery winning........................
Choose humility and accept the fact the only certainty is uncertainty.
Fortune doesn’t favor the brave. It rewards the realists.
All of us have won the Universe’s equivalent of the Mega-Jackpot Lottery by simply existing.
Don’t squander your good fortune by listening to people spraying a firehose of certitude.
-Tony Isola, from here
An understatement............
When it came to the economy, the federal government’s framework of understanding had lost touch with the truth.
-Martin Gurri, from here
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
acceptance.........................
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your life.
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Reading..................................
.............................................is not "interactive":
But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head.
Checking in...........................
..................................with Morgan Housel:
I try to keep in mind that there are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. It’s so obvious which leads to a happier life.
A few words.................................
................................from some long shots:
There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.
-U. S. Grant
-U. S. Grant
A la base de notre civilisation, il y a la liberté de chacun dans sa pensée, ses croyances, ses opinions, son travail, ses loisirs.
(At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.)
-Charles de Gaulle
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
-Viktor Frankl
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
-Helen Keller
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
-Frederick Douglass