Fun times in downtown Newark this evening.....

..................as thousands of folks lined the streets to meet and greet the Budweiser Clydesdales.

many thanks to Matesich Distributing

curve balls.....................

 

      This cartoon perfectly encapsulates the conflict that occupies nearly every financial decision you make in life.  The essence of successful investing, retirement planning and life in general is balance.  You have to plan for the future but live in the present.  You have to enjoy the moment but plan for old age.  You have to invest for the long run but survive the short run.  It's difficult to balance enjoying life now and ensuring you have the resources to enjoy life later.

     There is no ideal balance for everyone because we all have different goals, needs, resources, expectations, and desires.  The hardest part about planning for your financial future is the simple fact that you don't know what will happen.  No one has it all figured out because no one knows what various curve balls life is going to throw at them.  So you do the best you can.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward: How to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth

On complexity and complications........

 

     One way to understand the numinous right hemisphere is that it manages life's complexity.  Complex challenges in life are easy to understand but impossible to solve, so they can only be lived and understood.  This is in contrast to the complicated parts of life (managed in the left hemisphere), which can be hard to understand but are solvable once and for all.

     Life is full of both kinds of challenges.  I need to understand others' emotions (a complex challenge), but I also need to make smart decisions, which in many cases means acting in spite of these emotions (a complicated challenge).

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness

More things I never knew..............

 

     Many Frenchmen served in America during the Revolution.  There were more French combatants at Yorktown than Americans.*  Lafayette personified all his countrymen in the American mind because he had come early, before the formal alliance, and stayed late.  His French comrades were professionals and, to the extent they had opinions, realpolitikers, serving in obedience to orders and to advance French interests, Lafayette was a volunteer and an enthusiast.  He had the ability to engage and impress people, which might be called a talent if that did not suggest skill and practice, whereas with him the effect was as artless as his intentions were sincere.

-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

*If one queries ChatGPT, one reads that the numbers of foot soldiers at Yorktown were fairly even between French and American (and, combined, significantly outnumbered the British).  When adding the number of French sailors, who blockaded the British and prevented their escape, then ChatGPT says the statistic is correct.

worthy......................

 

     After which, satisfied with the way in which he had conducted himself at Meung, without remorse for the past, confident in the present, and full of hope for the future, he retired to bed, and slept the sleep of the brave.

-Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

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

 

We all become stories. The question becomes how will yours end?

-Tony Isola, from his post, On The Clock

Just another one of those things I've never given much thought about............

 

The underlying idea here is energy and power aren’t the same. Energy is how much you’ve got. Power is how fast you can use it.

-as culled from today's Stephen McBride post

unlearning............................

 

. . . economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his class a take-home midterm, the way he had for years. The class average came back at 96% in a course where midterms historically averaged 65 to 80. Suspicious that the students were using AI, he made the final exam in-person. The average collapsed to 48.6%, the lowest he’d ever seen. Dozens of students had likely used AI on the midterm, and the final exam revealed how little they actually knew. These are Ivy League students holding the most powerful learning tool ever built, and instead of using it to learn, they used it to skip learning because thirteen years of school didn’t teach them how to learn, or even why it’s important.

-Austin Scholar, from this episode

never forget...................

 

more fun here

shooting from the hip................

 

He found it especially uncomfortable to decide so many issues that one could only "guess at":  "It is unpleasant when you do not have time really to familiarize yourself with the work."

     Two quite distinct problems underlay these concerns.  One is common to most new judges, particularly those who, like Hand, had limited courtroom experience.  The United States, unlike most countries, has never had a professional judiciary; practitioners come to the bench without training in judging.  Only experience can teach the new American judge how to steer through the complexities of trial procedures and preside calmly over a lawsuit.  The difficulty is aggravated for new federal judges, who are often unfamiliar with the specialties of federal judicial business.  Although the range of problems before federal courts in 1909 was narrower than it is today, judges then did deal with many issues: problems of torts, contracts, and other fields of common law—with which most new appointees were likely to be acquainted from their law practice—but also more esoteric federal fields such as banking, patent, copyright, and admiralty.  Hand had no familiarity with any of these

     The second problem was still more difficult.  While experience had taught Hand how a courtroom is run and had acquainted him with federal law, the need "to decide so many things" that he could only "guess at," without adequate opportunity for study and reflection, would always trouble him.  When presiding over a trial, the judge must often shoot from the hip, issuing immediate rulings from the bench that grand or deny motions, determine admissibility of evidence, and in general keep the proceeding going without long pauses for studying and writing an opinion on a controversial issue.  This aspect of the work was especially uncongenial to a person as thorough, and sometimes indecisive, as Learned Hand—the man whom Felix Frankfurther occasionally called "the modern Hamlet."

-Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge

passing along secrets..........

     As a child, I became intent on learning the names of everything, from cars (there was a Chevrolet going by; our car was a Ford) to the fact that the tree in our front yard was an oak.  I was fascinated by the revelation that a car could have many names—it could also be a Buick or a Pontiac or a Chrysler.  Our tree was an oak, but the tree in our neighbors' yard was a maple.  They looked the same to me, but they had different names, and for a while it seemed that every individual tree must have its own name, which would be a lot to remember.

     I went so far as to believe that my parents, in giving me all those names, were passing along secrets.  Other people were unaware of the names within the names.  The knew the work "tree" but only my parents and I were able to call this tree oak and that tree maple.  I felt like an insider, a secret comrade to trees and cars, birds and flowers, and shoes and books. 

-Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing

thanks David

Sixty years ago....................

 

Alka-Seltzer commercial "No Matter What Shape"

The T-Bones.................................No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach is in)

consistency................

 

"Never buck the other man's game, Val," Reilly said, "but watch the percentages.  It is not one or two pots that make a poker player, but the consistency with which he plays."

-Louis L'Amour, Reilly's Luck

Hiding behind a polarizing man...........

 

There are at least two, each complicated, layers to this story. The first is about decades of misguided bipartisan policy on research into dangerous viruses. The second is about how the U.S. government and academia have communicated the relationship between this strategy and the origin of the virus from 2020 onward. The first may have had disastrous consequences for global health security; the second has contributed to eroding trust in American democracy.

-as culled from this The FreePress issue

Here is one way to look at it......

 

In fact, I think AI is quickly becoming the most sophisticated form of procrastination.

-Mark Manson, from this newsletter

What could possibly go wrong..........?

 

Amazon is on a mission to shrink two-day delivery down to the amount of time it takes to carry a pizza to a customer. Its drones, which are capable of transporting packages weighing up to 5 pounds and can fly as far as 7.5 miles from their home bases, are playing an increasingly important role in the ultrafast delivery push, and currently operate in 11 metropolitan areas including Dallas, Houston and the suburbs around Phoenix.

-from this Daily Upside newsletter

Musings on AI....................

To be honest, I am writing this post for an audience of one (me), with the purpose of clarifying for myself how to make sense of this space, and if it does help you make sense of this disruption, it is a side benefit.

Through human existence, revolutionary change has been a constant, and even when that change has been an advance for humanity, it has always come with pain for those that the change renders obsolete and unanticipated side costs. At the risk of overreach, I will argue that every major disruptive change has gone through four phases: a period of hope and hype, where the change is viewed as big, but it is unclear how and in what form it will be delivered, a period of build-up, where a subset of people (with more belief in the change and more willingness to take risks) start investing and building products to make the change happen, a period of business building, where the change is monetized and businesses form, and a recalibration, where the change works its way through the economy and society, in both good ways (increased productivity and welfare, new businesses) and bad ways (displacement and damage).

-Aswath Damodaran, from this edition

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

 

.................................with Poor Richard:

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

The way to be safe, is never to be secure.

Success has ruin'd many a man.

Observe all men; thyself most.

Half the truth is often a great lie.

Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

 A mob's a monster; heads enough, but no brains.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of.\

If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.

every minute......................

 

Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don't wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future.   Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it's at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.

-Earl Nightingale

What would happen .......................

 

...................................If we stopped trying to win the conversation and started trying to understand the person in front of us?

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

 

........................................of side quests.

1936.....................

   

     The kind of campaign Huey envisioned would require tremendous amounts of money.  Be he believed that he would have ample resources to conduct it, for in addition to his own Louisiana revenues, he had been promised help from an unexpected quarter.  Representatives of some of the biggest corporation and banks in the country came to him secretly and pledged huge contributions, up to two million dollars or even more if he would remove Roosevelt from the White House.  He was astonished at the depth of their hatred for the President and reminded one man that he was more radical than Roosevelt.  "We're not for you either," the man spat out.  "Just give me the money," Huey said amiably, probably reflecting that these conservatives were no smarter than the ones in Louisiana.

     The threat of Huey's third party alarmed the Roosevelt high command.  Jim Farley caused a secret poll to be taken of Huey's national strength.  The result was disquieting.

-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long

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

  

Pat Metheny..........................Bright Size Life

What then is the spirit of liberty?......

I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten - that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.

-Judge Learned Hand

Checking in with Lord Acton.......

 

-The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.

-The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

-Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor; and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God.

-Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. 

-By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

-all quotes from John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834 –1902).  More here

School starts locally later this week......

 

Jim Rohn...................

 

-Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

-You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. You don’t have charge of the constellations, but you do have charge of whether you read, develop new skills and take new classes.

-Learn how to turn frustration into fascination. You will learn more being fascinated by life than you will by being frustrated by it.

-You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

-The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not a bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.

-all quotes from Jim Rohn, more here