Eric Barker tackles..............................

 

.........................................meaning.   A wee excerpt:

Meaning is constructed, fabricated, stitched together out of obligation, loyalty, neediness, and a desperate, gorgeous refusal to give up on each other. If you’re waiting until you feel “whole” to show up for your kid, your family, your trivia team, you will die waiting. Show up broken. Show up faking it. Show up resentful and messy and tired. Show up anyway. That’s where meaning is. That’s the whole game. That’s all there ever was.

In the background.........................

Dave Koz.........................The Dance album

 

2025 was exciting and interesting, but..............

 

................2026 is a verification year, not a promise year.

Thirty five lessons......................

 

........................................from 35 years.

Evergreen.....................

 

The quality of output depends entirely on the quality of your input.

-Nicholas Bate

Morgan Housel is one smart dude.....

 

I think the majority of society problems are all downstream of housing affordability. . . . Every economic issue is complex, but this one seems pretty straight forward: we should build more homes. Millions of them, as fast as we can. It’s the biggest opportunity to make the biggest positive impact on society.

-from this post

In the background..............

Sade...........................The Best of Sade album

 

Aging like a fine wine - Part 1..........

 

All twenty here too.  Well, actually on #12, I recorded music from the radio to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, not a cassette.   Concerning typewriters - earned beer money in college by typing a friend's twice per week three page psychology papers.   Learned some psychology along the way.  It was a win-win-win.  Concerning maps - still prefer to look at a large scale paper map to get the "lay of the land" before setting off on a new journey.  Helps.  

On aging like a fine wine...............

 

..................without becoming a burden.

Is there no one........................

 

........................................to help him?

Here is a clue from our friends at Google:

A cask strength dry gin is a potent, barrel-aged gin bottled at a high proof (often 50-60%+ ABV) without significant dilution, combining the crisp botanical notes of a traditional dry gin with rich, smooth, woody, and spicy flavors from oak barrels, offering an intense, full-bodied experience ideal for sipping neat or in powerful cocktails. Brands like Elephant Gin and Black Button create these by resting their London Dry style gins in used bourbon or oak barrels, adding complexity like vanilla, spice, and oak tannins to the juniper and citrus. 

"an atmosphere of persistent edginess".........

 

By nearly any material or technological measure, humanity has never been so prosperous, so capable, or so close to receiving the full blessings of science properly ordered to human need.

That does not mean everything is fine. It means despair is a distortion of reality. We are so accustomed to hearing what is broken that we forget to notice what is being built

-Jamie Wilson, advocating for some thoughtful perspective

Always bet on the optimist.............

What is required now is not naïve optimism, but adult confidence. A quiet cultural countercurrent is emerging: less outrage, more craft; less dependence on centralized authority, more responsibility; less performative despair, more building.

Powerful tools amplify whatever mindset governs them. In the hands of the resentful, they fuel paranoia. In the hands of the grounded, they enable stewardship.

-Jamie Wilson, from the same essay as quoted in the above post, now go read it.

In the background.....................

The Michael Stanley Band........the Stage Pass album

 

trying new things.............

 

the effects of the effects.....................

 

     In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: "You can never merely do one thing."  We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.  He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don't consider "the effects of the effects," you can't really claim to be doing any thinking at all.

-Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models

rules of the game................

 

     Quite a mixed bag, this government business.  The fate of the human condition depends on how ordinary people respond to the rules of the game.  And the rules of the game, in turn, depend largely on how governments respond to ideas circulating in society.  The process of political rules adapting to a changing world—what we call political change—creates new incentives that generate outcomes that we hope will improve the human condition and yet sometimes make it worse.  Yet, for all its importance, political change doesn't easily surmount status quo forces.

-Leighton and Lopez, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change

paradox........

Perhaps the greatest paradox in the story of spirituality is the mystical insight that we are able to experience release only if we ourselves let go.  This is the paradox of surrender.  Surrender begins with the acceptance that we are not in control of the matter at hand—in fact, we are not in absolute control of anything.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

Our debt.........................

 

via

Timeless lessons...............

 

.................shared by Ben Carlson:

Market volatility is an opportunity, not a reason to abandon your investment plan.

Don’t allow fear or greed to dictate your investment stance.

Don’t confuse your investment time horizon with someone else’s.

Don’t give in to FOMO.

Don’t allow recency bias, survivorship bias, hindsight bias, or short-term performance to guide your actions.

Never panic.

Never get too high in a bull market or too low in a bear market. You’re not smarter when the market goes up or dumber when it goes down.

Markets are constantly evolving. Human nature is not. The narratives are driven by price and price movements are fickle.

It’s always the same lessons!

Managing..............................

 

[I]f we learn to manage the voices in our heads well and get the right voices in the room, the whole thing can be a much more productive experience. An experience that, when it’s working well, is akin to the kind of beauty, insight, dignity, grace, . . .

Why would all of this matter? Because, quite simply, the quality of the conversation in our heads is manifested in the quality of everything else we say, decide, and do in our lives.

-as amended from this post

the risk of yield chasing..............

 

As a banker and financial journalist, Bagehot observed that outbreaks of financial recklessness did not occur at random.  Rather, they tended to appear at times when money was easy and interest rates lot.  He expressed this insight in his own inimitable fashion: "John Bull can stand many things, but he cannot stand two percent."  When interest rates fell to such a low level, investors reacted to the loss of income by taking greater risks.  In modern language, they engaged in "yield chasing".  John Bull—that personification of English common sense—made his first appearance in Bagehot's writing in an article for the Inquirer published on 31 July 1852:

‘John Bull’, says someone, ‘can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand two per cent . . .’ Here the moral obligation arises. People won’t take 2 per cent; they won’t bear a loss of income. Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible – a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping skates to the Torrid Zone. A century or two ago, the Dutch burgomasters, of all people in the world, invented the most imaginative occupation. They speculated in impossible tulips.

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