We all become stories. The question becomes how will yours end?
-Tony Isola, from his post, On The Clock
Sunday, August 23, 2026
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
Saturday, August 22, 2026
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
Sixty years ago....................
Alka-Seltzer commercial "No Matter What Shape"
The T-Bones.................................No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach is in)
Friday, August 21, 2026
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
Thursday, August 20, 2026
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.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
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
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.
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
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
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Checking up on Patrick O'Brian..............
In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”
-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Let's keep it that way.............
Old age keeps being put back, like the completion of a government building project.
-Theodore Dalrymple, In Search of the Consolations of Age
Rooting against the maths..............
A theory of intelligence might also finally decouple intelligence from consciousness. Intelligence is likely a computational quantity; consciousness is a phenomenal one. Of course, there is a chance that we might discover there is no general theory of intelligence at all; that like life, intelligence is a squishy, messy, almost illusionary phenomenon that cannot be encapsulated into a mathematical formula. That would be unfortunate, but good to know sooner rather than later.
-Kevin Kelly, from this substack episode
Yes and no.............
No’s mean more than yes’s. Saying yes is easy—people say yes to things they don't care about all the time.
Saying no requires you to be willing to lose something. That's how you know it's real.
-Mark Manson, from here
On Peter Drucker and future breadwinners...
Born in Vienna in 1909, Drucker stumbled onto the writing of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he was only 19. To give you a sense of what Drucker was all about, he began studying Danish simply so that he could read Kierkegaard’s at-that-time-still-untranslated writings. By 1933, he was a lecturer in the German city of Frankfurt. When the Nazi government fired all the Jewish professors on staff, Drucker decided he could not and would not be complicit in the abuses of the autocratic regime. He left for London a couple of days later.
-Ari Weinzweig, from this issue
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
