On listening...........................

      It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.  Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there.  By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

     Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.  In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.

-Chris Voss, Never Split The Difference:  Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

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

At the Movies..............................Woody Allen and Friends             Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid To Ask)

  

Hey, that's Ohio he is talking about................

 Heartland Manufacturing Renaissance | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Joel Kotkin points to good things (from an economic development point of view) happening in Ohio.  The Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority gets a nod:

The Buckeye State, notes Rick Platt, president and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority, “never skipped a beat on funding development.” More than 60 such authorities in Ohio work to attract industry with capital financing, infrastructure investment, land preparation, and speculative building development. Such efforts often tend to be largely expensive money-wasters, but in Ohio they have proved more successful. For the past quarter-century, Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority has transformed the former Newark Air Force Base into a hotbed of more than 20 companies with a total of 1,650 jobs. The companies operate in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical products, automotive and energy-related products, and even the world’s first organic baby food company, located in the industrial city of Heath (population 10,000), one of four plant-based food firms in the area. Licking County’s manufacturing workforce has expanded by 10,000 this decade.

On re-teaching old dogs old tricks...................

     The big question that we all face, as we look towards the second half of the year, is whether the pullback in risk capital is temporary, as it was in 2020, or whether it is more long term, as it was after the dot-com bust in 2000 and the market crisis in 2008. If it is the former, there is hope of not just a recovery, but a strong rebound in risky asset prices, and if it is the latter, stocks may stabilize, but the riskiest assets will see depressed prices for much longer. I don't have a crystal ball or any special macro forecasting abilities, but if I had to guess, it would be that it is the latter. Unlike a virus, where a vaccine may provide at least the semblance of a quick cure (real or imagined), inflation, once unleashed, has no quick fix. Moreover, now that inflation has reared its head, neither central banks nor governments can provide the boosts that they were able to in 2020 and may even have to take actions that make things worse, rather than better, for risk capital. Finally, at the risk of sounding callous, I do think that a return of fear and a longer term pullback in risk capital is healthy for markets and the economy, since risk capital providers, spoiled by a decade or more of easy returns, have become lazy and sloppy in their pricing and trading decisions, and have, in the process, skewed capital allocation in the economy. If a long-term slowdown is in the cards, it is almost certain that the investment strategies that delivered high returns in the last decade will no longer work in this new environment, and that old lessons, dismissed as outdated just a few years go, may need to be relearned. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

True this...............................

 If there is one thing we learned from social science over the last century is that we may produce unintended consequences, even the opposite effect of what we desire, if we react simplistically to situations and don’t consider human psychology.

-Steven Novella, as cut-and-pasted from here

Checking in......................

 ........with our friends at Gaping Void:

Here is a string of words.................

 .........we haven't seen in over a decade:

And housing inventory is increasing quickly.

Lifetime learning................

      By not giving in to your emotions, you were able to delay your reactions and think.  That is important.  We will always have emotions of fear and greed.  From here on in, it's imperative for you to use those emotions to your advantage, and for the long term to not let your emotions control your thinking.  Most people use fear and greed against themselves.  That's the start of ignorance. . . . Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions.

-Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

Checking in.........................

........with the always interesting Martin Gurri:

 But the beginning of any human structure is an uncertain affair. The present is always a tangle of contradictory visions and conflicting interests. What appears to be of all-consuming importance today is forgotten tomorrow—and even the supposed clarity of hindsight is mostly an illusion.  We know exactly when and how Rome fell, but why such a backwater of a city became one of history’s greatest empires remains a mystery. . . .

Mir insists that the disappearance of the newspaper must mean the end of journalism. I agree. A model formed to exploit scarcity can’t be expected to function in an era of overabundance. The facts of the world, it turns out, are virtually infinite in number and incoherent in pattern. The digital age resembles the Tower of Babel—an uproar of mutually unintelligible voices. The New York Times and CNN merely contribute to the din. In such an environment, conspiracy theories can become plausible explanations for the behavior of scientists. The more information we absorb, the less we understand.

-two excerpts from his essay, The Fall and Rise of the Mediators

 

Unsettled.......................

 for science . . . commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

-Thomas Huxley

choosing............................

 But somewhere along the way between her epoch and ours, as the world became more and more unsteady, humanity was sold on the expensive dream of living certain rather than bewildered, the dream of choosing — or being chosen for — the islanded certitudes of power over the open horizons of truth. The “dark ocean of space” lost its stardusted luster as we grew more and more unwilling to remain uncertain about the nature of reality and the open-endedness of the future.

-Maria Popova

The mystery.................................

 Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything because he can explain everything. But no explanation is true for they don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.

The knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirror-like quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.

-Osho

On true art.............

 

Claude Monet    oil on canvass   Haystacks     1890

The deepest mystery of all, I think, is the one to which biblical faith points, which is the idea that we are made not only of matter that comes from the earth and stars, but we are made in the image of God.  Whatever that means.  I don't know what it means altogether, but I think it means that we bear his mark upon us.  Deep within us.  The face of Christ is within us, his thumbprint is upon us.  The world adds all sorts of things to that holy self that God made, but it still is there, and though we lose track of it in a million ways, I think it remains, if we are lucky at all, as a source of goodness, of flashes of insight, good dreams, good prayers that somehow pray themselves, of healing.

     I think that this is the place from which all true art comes, and by true art I mean art that doesn't just entertain—perfectly alright to do that—but true art that nourishes the spirit, that illuminates the mind, that deepens understanding, that deepens our humanity.  I think that what true art, and true religion, does at its best is to put each one of us in touch with that holy part of ourselves, with that source from which art and love comes, and from which all good, wise things come, so that we—by virtue of this painting, this poem, this ballet, this piece of music, this Scripture—become finally, truly, human at last.

-Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

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

Santana.........................Just In Time To See The Sun

 

On fanaticism........................

       All this is to say that we should not ignore the fanaticisms and the appeal of fanaticisms within the West, even in the (so far) victoriously defended Anglo-American sphere.  Some of this fanaticism is little more than a comfortable anti-Americanism or anti-plural society attitude, which it would be overprecise to call adolescent, as with the teenage appeal of posters, beret at a becoming angle, of Che Guevara.  It might be suggested that as one section of the human brain grows, this diverts nutrients from other sections, which are therefore stunted, and perhaps that in adolescence, under a different physiological mechanism, toxins are produced from which recovery is slow and sometimes never takes place.

      In much of the supposed liberal world, there was, and is, alas, a sympathy for such critics of the consensual, manifested at its worst in toleration of student-activist actions that silence free speech, disrupt universities, and so on.  There are examples almost daily, as informed readers know.

      Clearly, one of the mental conditions we can discourage is righteousness.  This may afflict left and right wing alike, as we all know.  It is fair to point out that in some cases it emerges only on a particular issue or two—though in others almost the whole mental approach seems warped that way.  In certain types of public oratory this is more or less acceptable.  But when it is presented as an argument, moderate or mature minds simply switch themselves off.

-Robert Conquest,  The Dragons of Expectations (2005)

The hopeful birth.......................

 ....................of a sub-division:  Episode 24

Oops.......  Not every day is perfect and works exactly the way you want it to.  While preparing to install the laterals from the main sanitary sewer line to the individual building lots, we broke the main line.  The system just won't work with a broken main.  Repairs are in order—now completed.  

I shudder to think.....................

 

arguably the most important battle.......

 .............................in the history of the United States.

On the trajectory....................

 Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: Incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is ever enough.

Morgan Housel, from here

Love is wise, hatred is foolish..............

A message to future generations (1959)/Bertrand Russell

 

Hate it when that happens................

 more fun here

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

The Temptations...............Papa Was A Rolling Stone

this vital interplay between.......

 ..............................freedom and belonging, between nature and human nature

Read more on the existential wanderlust of Rockwell Kent at this Marginalian post.

26 so far. 30 will satisfy...............

 

      via

Wisdom.............................

 ..................(the better the crust, the better the pie)

the untold story............

 If we want to understand before we are understood, we must deploy what John Steinbeck referred to as "a good ear."  A good ear is one that hears below the surface.  Every text has a subtext, and it is usually the subliminal messages that have the most power and truth.  It is a rule of human nature that we often say what we do not mean.  We use words that are not true to how we feel.  We distort and hide and obfuscate, usually because we fear presenting the real us and being rejected for it.  Given this, if we want to be deep listeners we must listen between the lines to the silences, the emotions, the doubts, the deep-seated beliefs that influence a person's life, choices and self-image.  We listen for the untold story.

-Adam S. McHugh, The Listening Life

Making a magnificent structure fit for use..........

 Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.

-Chief Justice John Marshall, as he concludes the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

We have long thought.................

.............that the psychological component to the economy was both underrated and undervalued.  One lesson taken away from Reagan and Trump is that optimism matters.  Faithful readers may remember that, while mostly fearless, we fear deflation more than inflation.

Ben Carlson weighs in:

There is a lot we still don’t understand about inflation, especially since there is such a huge psychological component to prices and spending by consumers.

Inflation could remain elevated for some time if governments continue to spend money or the energy crisis worsens.

But it also wouldn’t surprise me to see severe disinflation or even deflation if the Fed overplays its hand with interest rate hikes and we go into a recession.

Maybe we’re due for more economic volatility than we’ve had these past 4 decades. Or maybe the pandemic will be an outlier because there was so much economic weirdness going on.

It’s good to keep an open mind about what comes next in regards to both prices and financial markets.

Nope............................

 more fun here

Please...........................

 

 more fun here

Checking in.................................

 ..............with Robert Louis Stevenson:

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits

 Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. 

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

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

mental factions......................

      There are minds that, having risen beyond primitive, unthinking orthodoxies, often merely turn to a rejection of the traditional.  Whoever has made this apparent advance is convinced that he or she has reached a superior condition.  Minds that have improved their knowledge and remained open to more have indeed progressed.  But we often find those who have achieved a critical attitude to the traditional have also adopted a largely, or wholly, uncritical attitude to untried, or even failed, alternatives whose attraction so verbal rather than real.

     "Special interests" are often, and sometimes rightly, indicted for various social and other offenses.  But, of course, special interests are not necessarily economic.  What may reasonably be called interest groups could equally be emotional or mental factions, that is, insistent minorities in society.  Often, what is more, they themselves feel pressure from their own extremer wings—that is to say, a minority within a minority.  Greed is only one of the deadly sins.

-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation:  Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

thanks Michael

An easy choice...............

 

via

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

The Doobie Brothers..............the Toulouse Street album

Be careful what you wish for......

 I am radically opposed to technology (it goes without saying), but also against politics and social reform. These oppressive disciplines have been invented by do-gooders, seeking the perfection of the world. They are, characteristically, in league with devils.

-David Warren, from "The beauty of a world in confusion"

Good thing........................

via

Keeping your...................................

 ...........................................balance.

Humility is always a good idea..............

 "I was very puzzled when a year ago so many people were so confident that inflation was transitory," he said. "There was so much we didn’t understand about the post-COVID inflation that humility would have been a good idea."

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Quest...........................

 

What makes this country great, I think, is not what it gives us (which is considerable), but what it allows us to give to others.

When we talk about American enterprise, this is what we mean. When we talk about “building something”, that is what we’re really after. The opportunity to be a net positive on this Earth. A producer of something meaningful and lasting, not just a passive consumer of bread and circuses.

That is the real American Dream. Lest we forget.

-Gaping Void, from here

I miss Doug Fine........................

 

Miracles happen, or fun with numbers........

 There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a 1-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to 8,000 people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a 1-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the media’s desire to promote shocking headlines, you will hear their names and see their faces.

-Morgan Housel, from here

It would have certainly been interesting.........

 Interesting thought experiment - ask yourself how the country would have been different if the Democrats had chose Marianne Williamson instead of Joe Biden in the last election. Kind of a fun exercise. Things couldn't have been worse under Williamson than under Biden. Maybe not even more goofy under Williamson.

-Chris Lynch, from here

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

      The blackest nighttime sky was suddenly shot through with powerful bolts of lightning that brightened the heavens and thundered like a lion making its presence known.  While the violent electrical thunderstorm raged on, displaying the undisputed power and mystery of nature, a young mother labored in a small, one-window room with wood-planked flooring to birth a child who would be called Nikola.  As she shook the bed, writhing in pain and joy, gale-force winds mercilessly battered manmade structures outside, while the midwife beside her was so frightened by the moment that she nervously said, "He'll be the child of the storm."  His mother responded insistently, "No, of light." (History suggests they were both correct, as the life of Nikola Tesla would prove to ride the storm of bipolar disorder while lighting the world both literally and figuratively with his genius.)

-Marko Perko and Stephen M. Stahl, Tesla: His Tremendous and Troubled Life

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

 more fun here

Talk about valuable real estate...........

 more fun here

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

At the cinema........Liza Minnelli & Joel Grey in Cabaret

 

Chris Lynch...........................

 .................explains himself.  From a March 17, 2004 post, in like his second week of blogging.

Believe it or not........................

 ..................I've never read a book written by James Patterson.  That may change soon:

He insists that parents adopt an iron law: “We read in our house.”

Constantly......................

 via

The risk of undercharging................

 At a time when everyone is wondering about the "cost" of things, it may help to remind yourself that what you get paid is a reflection of what you've done to be WORTH IT! This doesn't mean pulling a price randomly out of thin air. Nor does it mean only charging what "others" charge, either. That's because what YOU DID and what YOU DO to be worth it is YOURS ALONE.

-Matthew Ferrara, the story of how he learned not to undercharge for his services may be found here

expectations.............................

      But this breathtaking increase in the money supply did not, at least immediately, set off inflation.  For while inflation is a monetary phenomenon, it is also a psychological one: when the expectation of inflation becomes widespread, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

     That prophecy was fulfilled in 2021.  With the Biden administration continuing pandemic relief, which discouraged many for seeking work, and restricting oil and gas production, inflation set in.   Supply chain issues also contributed.

     By December 2021, consumer prices were up seven percent on an annual basis, the highest in 40 years, while producer prices were up 9.6 percent, the highest since that statistic has been compiled.  And the expectation of further inflation is now deeply embedded in the economy.

     Regardless of this, the Biden administration is still pushing hard for its "Build Back Better" plan, which would add at least another $5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.  And President Biden has airily said that "Milton Friedman is no longer in charge."

     But unfortunately for the Biden presidency—and for the American people—Milton Friedman was right.  Create too much money and you get inflation.  We are witnessing the proof of that right now.

-John Steele Gordon, as he concludes this essay

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Us folk involved...................

 ..........in the business of building things will take our blessings wherever we can find them.

 via

Pirate stories.................

 .................are worth reading.  Read, and thoroughly enjoyed, the last two of these.  The first one is on-order.  Might suggest adding this one to the list:

Wisdom.................

 The most critical component of your retirement plan is how you feel about yourself, not the size of your portfolio.

-Tony Isola, from here

surprise and mystery....................

 So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.

-Trish Harrison Warren via David Kanigan

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

5th Dimension...(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep At All

The hopeful birth.........................

 ................of a subdivision:  Episode 23:

We have had a rainy spring.  Hard to put pipe in the ground when it is soaking wet.  Having said that, progress is being made.  The sanitary sewer main lines have been installed and we are about halfway through the installation of the storm sewer system.  Nothing wrong here that a few dry weeks won't cure.

Preparing the ground for a storm structure

Work completed about an hour ago

Lifting the storm structure

Attention to detail: cleaning mud off the bottom of the structure

Put it right about there

Right where it belongs

D. R. Horton building out the 49 first phase lots

customers.................

      The reach and power of Giannini's branch banking empire in California was extraordinary, beyond the comprehension of people living outside the state.  "I still can't realize that in forty years a man has built something out here that compels the awe—that's the right word, awe—of all New York," said an East Coast financial writer on his first trip to San Francisco in the late 1940s.  With 504 branches and four million individual customers, Bank of America held the savings deposits of one out of every three Californians, or 40 percent of the state's total bank deposits. . . .

      Giannini always remained the bank's most energetic booster.  He would go to extremes to attract new depositors and to keep them as customers.  He did this partly to reaffirm Bank of America's relentlessly promoted images as a "people's bank" and  partly out of his own fierce competitive urge; there was no such thing as an unimportant customer.  "When you sell people," he was fond of saying, "keep them sold."

      As successful as Giannini was, nothing generated more public comment than his disregard for his own wealth.  He saw no point in accumulating money or in surrounding himself with the signs of material success.  The home in which he lived until the end of his life was the one he had purchased when he was selling fruits and vegetables on the San Francisco waterfront. The wardrobe of the man whom Fortune would include in its Hall of Fame of America's ten greatest businessmen consisted of four off-the-racks suits, three pairs of shoes, and a handful of shirts and ties.  "My hardest job," he said on one occasion, "was to keep from becoming a millionaire."

Felice A. Bonadio, A. P. Giannini: Banker of America

a common effort....................

      The socialist Robert Nisbet once lamented that no great state can really long endure without a common effort to create unity and a collective belief that it is exceptional or at least better than the alternative: "No government can hope to achieve anything of a political, social, and economic character that rises much above the level of a written statute unless there is present a sense of veneration for that government that is but another way of expressing patriotism."  In other words, a state that does not exalt common citizenship itself loses credibility.  Cynical citizens see no need to heed its rules.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen

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

On the television............David Carradine in Kung Fu

 

Steady as she goes...............

 Hard money in the long run is more sustainable than easy money in the short run.

-Ben Carlson, as he looks to John Candy as an investing role model

Wisdom............................

 ...........................follow the three R's.

mind-body learning..............

       Tightly constrained by risk-averse, health-and-safety-obsessed society, many children are unable to light fires, paddle canoes, make shelters, use knives or cope with darkness.  Further, children are discouraged from acts of physical courage and this is more serious than it appears, for we learn with our bodies as well as our minds—or rather we learn with the mind-body—and when we see our physical selves modelling bravery, our sense of moral courage, political courage, emotional courage or intellectual courage is heightened.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

The adventure-monitor creeps up .......

      The risk-averse society denies the very idea of freedom's role, it stops chance throwing a wild card, it kills the free play of luck.  The adventure-monitor creeps up. pouring cold water on every fire-pit, banning people from bringing home-made cakes to school fetes.  In the otherwise important UNICEF report into childhood well-being in 2007, the authors comment that health and safety "did not feature highly in children's priorities".  Who knew?

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

heart...........................

 When your heart is filled with gratitude for what you do have, your head isn't nearly so worried about what you don't.

-Douglas Pagels

fund-raising...............

      War is, by far, the most expensive of all government operations.  And both the Confederate and United States governments faced unprecedented financial stresses in funding the Civil War.  How each of them met the challenge helped determine, in no small way, the outcome of the war.

     Governments have only three ways to fund operations.  They can tax, they can borrow, and they can print.  Both governments did all three, but the particular mix was very different.  The northern states had a much more advanced economy and a well-established financial system in place.  As a result, the U. S. was able to throw much of the cost of the war onto the future.  In 1860, the national debt had stood at $64 million.  By 1866, it was at $2.7 billion, and about five percent of the North's population has invested in federal bonds.  So the North was able to raise two-thirds of its revenues by borrowing. . . .

     The South had to meet fully 50 percent of its revenue by printing money.  State and City governments also printed money.  And because the South lacked good paper mills and state-of-the-art printing facilities, counterfeiting flourished.  Altogether, the South printed about $1.5 billion in that money, three times as much as the North, despite having only twelve percent of the circulating currency before the war and 21 percent of banking assets.

     The result was catastrophic inflation.  Prices rose 700 percent in the South in just the first two years of the war.  As the war continued, the inflationary spiral deepened and the southern economy began to spin out of control.  Living standards fell sharply while hoarding, shortages, and black markets spread, eroding popular support for the war.

-John Steele Gordon, from his essay Inflation in the United States

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

At the cinema.....................................The Godfather

 

George gives a spelling lesson....

 via

a special term.................

      Money is just another commodity, no different from petroleum, pork bellies, or pig iron.  So money, like all commodities, can rise and fall in price, depending on supply and demand.  But because money is, by definition, the one commodity that is universally accepted in exchange for every other commodity, we have a special term for a fall in the price of money:  we call it inflation.  As the price of money falls, the price of every other commodity must go up.

     And what causes the price of money to fall?  The answer is very simple: an increase in the supply of money relative to other goods and services.

-John Steele Gordon,  from his essay, Inflation in the United States

a work-in-progress............

      Happiness comes from solving problems.  The keyword here is "solving."  If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable.  If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable.  The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

     To be happy we need something to solve.  Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher.  It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house.  You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job—or even a book, for that matter.

     Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today's problems will lay the foundations for tomorrow's problems, and so on.  True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

-Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

melting-pot ethos......

      America, which survived a gory civil war among political and geographical factions, has become so far one of history's few exceptions.  The ultimate rationale of America's unique Constitution led Americans eventually to define themselves by their shared values, not by their inconsequential appearances.  Eventually, most who were willing to give up their prior identities and assume a new American persona were accepted as Americans.  The United States has always cherished its universally applicable melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum—of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage in the manner that diverse colonies united to become one nation.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  The Dying Citizen

On finding out........................

 We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal:  An Earthly Cosmology

conceptually malevolent................

      This is why the risk-averse attitude of modernity is not only annoying but conceptually malevolent.  It works against the correct instinct children have that they must find a working relationship with chance and risk . . .

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood

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

The Beach Boys..........................Endless Summer

 

Traits for successful investing............

 In fact, most of Buffett’s pithy aphorisms boil down to the same basic message: “Just be sensible.”

This may be easier said than done.

-from this HumbleDollar post

Unfortunately.............................

 Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill. 

-Morgan Housel, from this post

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

The Eagles............................Peaceful Easy Feeling

 

Checking in...............................

 ..........................with Matt Ridley:

Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.

To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.

Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. 

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

. . .simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.

. . .time always erodes advantage

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.

American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.