The willingness to be corrected, to seek feedback, and to stay a perpetual student is the mechanism of mastery.
-Austin Scholar, from this substack
Monday, March 9, 2026
The fundamental laws...........
.............................of politics the Universe.
A wee sample: Muggeridge’s Law: Satire can never compete with real life for its sheer absurdity.
A minor quibble: the list omits the Unbreakable Law of Unintended Consequences.
quiets...........................
Throw the ball at the wall. Catch. Repeat. That’s the activity. But within that simplicity lies a calming that can help you feel relaxed and centred.
It’s meditative: the rhythm-throw, bounce, catch-creates the same focused attention as a breathing meditation. Your mind quiets because it’s occupied with simple repetition, not because you’re forcing it quiet.
Steve McQueen and his ball and glove, The Great Escape
Yep...........................
The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.
As we've always said, real estate investing is a get-rich-slowly scheme
It's a puzzle......................
That’s a major acceleration. 2.8% labor productivity growth is about equal to the best decades we’ve seen since World War 2. If that rate is sustained for a decade, or accelerates further, it’ll be pretty historic.
What’s driving the productivity boom? It’s tempting to conclude that AI is making white-collar workers more productive, but Ernie Tedeschi points out that the biggest swing has been in manufacturing productivity. For a long time, manufacturing productivity was basically flatlining in America; now it’s suddenly growing again.
Tedeschi argues that this is also probably AI-driven, but it’s not about people using ChatGPT and Claude Code at work — it’s about the fact that a ton of data centers are being built, and data centers are very valuable:
If you look at data centers’ contribution to growth itself, it looks pretty small, but this masks the value of the computers contained within the data centers. Together, the creation of data centers and computing equipment have been contributing about as much to GDP growth as they were during the dot-com boom:
-Noah Smith, as cut-and-pasted from here
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Tim Ferriss........................
..........................visits the self-help trap.
Along the way, he suggests Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
should actually be Maslow's Hamburger of Needs.
..................worth the read.
Let us pray.....................
They may love dogs, read Victor Hugo novels, and prefer suits from Savile Row, but they are not like us.
And we should pray that we are never like them.
-Michael Wade, from his latest
a condition..................
Smith then inquired into wealth’s causes. He didn’t inquire into the causes of poverty. Smith understood that that poverty is humanity’s default mode. Nearly all people before Smith’s time — and still most people during his time — were mired in poverty. Poverty is simply the condition we suffer when wealth isn’t created. Wealth, not poverty, demands explanation because wealth, not poverty, has causes.
- Don Boudreaux, from here
My uncle is pretty smart..................
He collected over 28,000 forecasts made by 284 political analysts, economists, foreign policy bigwigs, and all the usual loud-talking necktie people. What Tetlock found (and I’m condensing 20 years of depressing data here) is that the average talking head was terrible at predicting real-world outcomes.
Not “mildly off.” Not “in the ballpark.” I mean barely better than chance. Turns out your uncle screaming at the TV is statistically equivalent to a CNN pundit in a bowtie.-Eric Barker, from his post, 4 Secrets to Smarter Thinking
Just the facts....................
If your favorite media outlet has you confused about what is going on in the Middle East, one idea would be to check in with the Institute for the Study of War blog. Until proven differently, it will be my go-to site.
It's the little things..................
From ancient times until now, wise men and women who wanted to make the world a better place didn’t start with some grandiose plan for others. Instead, they practiced the “make your bed” philosophy, where real change most often starts with self-improvement.
-Jeff Minick, with his list of seven ways
Saturday, March 7, 2026
Ten rules........................
.......................for dealing with uncertainty:
9. If all else fails, simplify. Einstein supposedly said the five levels of intelligence are smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius and simple.
As the world gets more complex you have to fight harder to keep things simple.
The solution to complexity is not more complexity. It’s simplicity.
aim....................
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
an instructed mind...............
It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.
-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
forgiving, forgetting, and responsibility...........
Confusing forgiving with forgetting sets another trap: We become convinced that mistakes and wrongdoings not only can, but should, be forgotten. Spiritual tradition sees it as a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of; instead, the sages and saints suggest, such difficulties are best put to use. The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by re-membering it that the possibility of atonement (making at-one) occurs and forgiveness comes to fruition. "Salvation lies in remembrance."
And so, finally, because the past is important, there can be no "unconditional forgiveness." Because we are human, and therefore limited, there can be no unconditional anything. We are not God. Forgetting that, as is our all-too-human tendency, we commit idolatry by assuming that since God loves and forgives unconditionally, we can be like God and do the same. But all "idolatry" has ironic consequences, producing the opposite of the goal intended. Thus the claim to "forgive unconditionally" is the antithesis of benign, for it devalues the one we are supposedly forgiving by implying that he is not responsible for his choices.
Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility. Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions. If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance—it comes to be interpreted as not caring. Every human being is responsible for his or her choices: which means, quite simply, that each of us has a need to matter—somehow, to someone. We especially need to know that our actions have an effect on the people we love.
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
hot-gospellers.................
No two more different people could be imagined than Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan: in appearance, in style, in manner, in speech and, it would seem, in what they stand for. Fuller is short and round and speaks in epic poetry. McLuhan is tall and angular and utters puns and epigrams. But both men became cult heroes at the same time, in the 1960s. And both for the same reason: they are bards and hot-gospellers of technology.
-Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
The Agenbite of Outwit ....................
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
-Marshall McLuhan, as culled from here
adjustments..................
Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
untouched...............
"Why are you so wary of thought?" said the philosopher. "Thought is the one tool we have for organizing the world."
"True. But thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it."
To his disciples he later said, "A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality."
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
Thursday, March 5, 2026
It's not about the Swiss watch...........
The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
-Paul Graham, from this essay
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
worship....................
He asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic'. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
Here's an idea...................
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
-attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Questions not asked..............
An interesting study on the Labor Force in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was published last month. It was noted that, in the past five years, there was an out-migration, with 182,000 "net domestic residents" leaving the Commonwealth. Judging from the study, this is a problem.
As far as I can tell, they never asked the question: why did they leave? It's a puzzle.
From your lips...................
Our national debt is just shy of 100% of GDP ($31 trillion), but we are not on the brink of a fiscal abyss. On the contrary, it is not unreasonable to think that Congress can manage some degree of spending control, and it is not the case that the economy faces a crushing burden of debt in any event, as Chart #13 shows. The true burden of debt is not the size of our national debt, but the cost of servicing that debt as a percent of our national income. Today that burden is significantly less than it was during the 1980s, mainly because interest rates are far lower than they were back then. If Congress exercises even modest restraint and the Fed doesn't have to raise interest rates (which they won't have to if inflation remains under control), then we can gradually reduce our deficits and the burden of our debt
All things considered, things don't look so bad at all!
-Calafia Beach Pundit, from this chart-filled post
What the World needs now................
The algorithms are designed to keep us as “users,” but the world needs us to be creators. When we move from being passive consumers to active curators, we learn better and build a body of work that matters.
A Great Reset.......................?
If there is a common theme running though the actions of the US in the past year, it is fighting back against the institutions, governments, and entities which want to undermine capitalism. That would be a really Great Reset.
-Brian S. Wesbury, from this post
Fun with science..................
APOD offers the difference between mid-infrared (Webb) and ultraviolet (Hubble). If you go to the site, you will be offered both a better description and the ability to toggle between the two views. Much fun.
Foggy...................
Forecasting the length and severity of war always seems easier with the benefit of hindsight, just like it is with markets.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
Applies to grandparenting as well......
Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn’t about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.”
-Daniel Smith, from here
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