Highly recommended.......................

 

. . . humans are "cognitive misers," relying on simple narratives instead of using complex analytic thinking.  The more compelling the narrative is, the more corrosive it becomes to our analytic abilities.

This is so wrong..............................

 

..................More than thirty days before Halloween and Macy's is offering Christmas decorations.  Stop it:

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

 

The worst smell in the world is dead badger.  He'd encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel.  Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn't know.  As it turned out, he couldn't do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it.  Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the later to the test, Max opted for a third way; he'd walk a different route for a while, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime.  Which was why he wasn't sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.

-Mick Herron, The Secret Hours

Ah, to be human...................

 

           more fun here

On the importance of..........................

 

..............................roots (and wings).

a revolution............

 

Law's reputation as a brilliant economist rests on some pamphlets he authored a decade or so after his escape to the Continent.  In his Essay on a Land Bank (c. 1703-4) and Money and Trade Considered (1705), the fugitive Scot displayed novel insights about the nature of money.  Money, he said, did not derive its value from precious metals, as people like Locke believed.  Rather, money was simply a yardstick of value; or, as he put it, "Money is not the Value for which Goods are exchanged, but the Value by which they are exchanged."  This clever switching of the prepositions—by in place of for—amounted to a monetary revolution.  In essence, he was saying that since money lacked intrinsic value it need not be backed by gold or other precious metals.

     A constant theme in Law's writings is that trade depends on the circulation of credit, and that credit was "only lost by a scarcity of Money."  Here Law anticipates later monetarists.  He argued that prosperity could be achieved by establishing a bank that issued paper money, collateralized with land rather than gold and silver.  By severing the link between money and precious metals, Law opened the possibility of a managed currency.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

experiments....................

 

Central bankers, who resort to printing money, manipulating interest rates and fueling asset price bubbles, exude a similar air of infallibility.  The fail to heed Cantillon's warning that it's all very well to embark on a grand monetary experiment, but there is no painless exit.  "What central bankers are doing now is exactly what Law recommended," Law's biographer Antoin Murphy wrote in the wake of the global financial crisis.  "From this perspective, it may be argued that, notwithstanding the failure of the Mississippi System, Law's banking successors have been Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi."

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Who's running things......................

 

If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point.  They're constantly judging everything they see.  They're playing back moves of things that happened to them yesterday.  They're living in fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow.  They're just pulled out of base reality.  That can be good when you do long-range planning.  It can be good when you solve problems.  It's good for us as survival-and-replication machines.

I think it's actually bad for your happiness.  To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master.  My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.

I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard.

-Naval Ravikant

Good question.......................

 

The idea of caring that someone is making money faster [than you] is one of the deadly sins.  Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.  There's a lot of pain and no fun.  Why would you want to get on that trolley?

-Charlie Munger

Highly recommended..................

 

   In his seminal work, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl challenges us to reframe how we think about purpose and meaning in life.  He writes that the age-old question "What is the meaning of life?" is not one we ask—it is one we answer. . . .

     To truly live, then, is to embrace each moment with purpose and appreciation.  It's to recognize that our time is limited, but our potential for impact is not.  It's to understand that in the game of life, how we play those final moments can define our entire legacy.

True for life in general..................

 Personal contentment and happiness, combined with peace of mind and a social circle of friends, are in my opinion more often than not a better measure of someone’s retirement situation than the size and performance of their portfolio.

-Mark Crothers

About anger.................

 

I don't believe in anger anymore.  Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, "Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody."  I don't want to be angry, and I don't want to be around angry people.  I just cut them out of my life.  I'm not judging them.  I went through a lot of anger too. They have to work through it on their own.  Go be angry at someone else, somewhere else.

-Eric Jorgenson, channeling Naval Ravikant

True, until it's not..............

 

Through time and across countries, history has shown that there is a symbiotic relationship between those who have wealth and those who have political power, and that the type of deal they have between them determines the ruling order.  That ruling order continues until the rulers are overthrown by others who grab the wealth and power for themselves.

     Wealth and power are mutually supportive.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order:  Why Nations Succeed and Fail

On human nature and history..........

 

     We cannot prevent insatiable desires from springing up in the heart of man.

     We cannot arrange things so that no work is required for these desires to be satisfied.

     We cannot avoid the fact that man's reluctance to work is as strong as his desire to have his needs satisfied.

     We cannot prevent the fact that, as a result of this state of affairs, there is a constant effort by men to increase their share of enjoyment while each of them tries by force or by fraud to throw the burden of labor onto the shoulders of his fellows.

     It is not up to us to wipe out universal history, to stifle the voice of the past that attests that things have been like this from the outset.  We cannot deny that war, slavery, serfdom, theocracy, abuse by government, privileges, frauds of all kinds, and monopolies have been the incontrovertible and terrible manifestations of these two sentiments that ar4e intertwined in the hearts of men:  attraction to pleasure, avoidance of pain.

     "By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread."  But everyone wants as much bread and as little sweat as possible.  This is the conclusion of history.

-Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, Second Series, 1847ish

paying it forward...............

 

At every turn, there were people who saw potential in me and invested in my future.

     These blessings weren't just gifts—they came with a responsibility.  I knew I could never directly repay those who had helped me, but I could honor their generosity by paying it forward, by lifting others up and bringing them along the way, just as so many had done for me.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For

Ultimately.....................

 

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.  These tasks, and therefore the meaning of live, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment.

-Viktor Frankl

still hard..............

 

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

On Social Security................

 

Ben Carlson takes an interesting look (with lots of charts and graphs) at us older Americans and our real estate, stock portfolios, and social security checks.

However, it’s crucial to recognize that Social Security remains a vital financial asset for a large number of Americans.

I hope we don’t screw it up someday.

Ed. Note:  Started getting Social Security checks at age 62.5.  As checks go, they are not very large.  Was only a W-2 employee for a handful of years.  By my Sweetie's calculation, if I live past 80, my net will be less than if I had waited longer to start collecting.  But, at age 62.5, we still had kids in college.  However meager the checks were, they came in handy then—the time value of money counts.

It's simple, really...................

 

Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.  A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables.  And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

-Charlie Munger

curious..................

 

I was born curious.  If that doesn't work for you, figure out your own damn system.

-Charlie Munger

And the hard work...................

 

....................to go with that look:

Declining conversation skills, attention spans, courage, and patience are four areas that deserve a hard look.