..........we should have stayed another week.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
intrinsic.....................
Money: It's your measure not your motivation. Money as a motivator is not sustainable. Do what you love; love what you do. Find the intrinsic worth in anything that you do.
-Nicholas Bate, Morph!
logical consequences...........
Is the idea of man as an image of God not utterly preposterous? How could flawed man, even the lowliest man or woman, possess a direct relationship to the divine? . . . But in the absence of that divine proposition, where would we be? . . . How could we possible manage without the tradition of inalienable rights and intrinsic individual responsibility that is the logical consequence of that axiomatic proclamation of our sacred worth?
-Jordan B. Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine
Paths......................
There's no such thing as a sweet deal without a clear path to significant growth.
-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars
On baking a bigger pie.................
To allow scarce and valuable skills a free hand is to risk having such skills become so highly rewarded as to provoke envy—a powerful and dangerous political force.
Part of such envy is natural, but much of it is hyped by intellectuals and politicians—both of whom get more worked up about how the pie is sliced than how big a pie it is.
-Thomas Sowell, from an essay found here
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Morgan Housel........................
.............tries to make sense of our world:
But let me put it this way: As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops.
In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.
A fascinating three minutes
By way of an update, here is the current Top Ten:
Monday, January 13, 2025
And we have front-row seats............
The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.
-Martin Gurri, as culled from here
One take on.....................................
......................the coming confirmation hearings:
But where's the cleansing sort of justice where you call up certain senators (I'm not going to name names) and say not only will we primary you and make sure you lose your Senate seat. We'll make certain you don't get a job after you leave the Senate. And then we're going to unleash some of the toughest people in the Republican Party to take a really close look at you. We're going to do to you what you plan to do to our nominees.
On eating the rich.....................
Effective anti-poverty strategies should focus on fostering self-sufficiency rather than perpetuating dependency.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Can I get an Amen.....................?
As always, the censors claimed that they needed sweeping powers to make the world better, safer and more truthful. And as censors always do, they proved themselves unworthy of those powers, which they deployed not just against ideas that were false but against politically inconvenient truths. In the process, they demonstrated why no one, of any ideological stripe, should be trusted with that kind of authority.
-Megan McCardle, from here
Crack my head up.................
ITEM 4: The New York Post tweeted,
“Billy Joel and Rod Stewart to play Yankee Stadium in July.”
Really? Those two rockers
are so old, they should be in the Senate, not on tour.
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Data centers...................
Data centers are electricity hogs, substantial water users, take up very large tracts of land on which they build very large buildings, and they offer very few (non-construction) jobs. They also pay a premium for sites they want, forcing land values up. Western Licking County is already home to data centers for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more. Micro Soft just purchased two large tracts of land in central Licking County to build two more of them. They paid a lot. A mixed blessing. As long as AI continues is growth pattern, we will undoubtedly see more in our future. We don't have to like it, though.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics...........
Data can be biased: There is a widely held belief that data is objective, at least if it takes numerical form. In the hands of analysts who are biased or have agendas, data can be molded to fit pre-conceptions.
-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here
Friday, January 10, 2025
One understanding..................................
..............................of Trump's election victory:
With The Great Clarification of what was really going on with lawfare, back-channel understandings between Big Tech and Big Govt, and questionable conduct by the FBI and the CIA, fear of him was replaced by fear of them.
Checking in ................................
..................................with Joseph Schumpeter:
We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going
The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.
The way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.
Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.
History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.
. . .the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Every piece of business strategy must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.
I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements.
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