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

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

As my young son would say..........

 

..........................he cracks my head up!

Daring.....................

 

via

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

 

.......with the Philosophy of Life X-files:

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.

via

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

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

 

                  The Best of Mountain album

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.

-Tanmay Vora

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

via

A whole lot of projecting going on........

 

We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated."  As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.

-Warren Meyer, thinking a bit about Iran

Simple......................

 

Simple and shallow sound the same until you ask the second question. The person who earned their simplicity can go ten levels deep when challenged. The person who skipped the work falls apart at level two.

-Shane Parrish, from this episode

A nonzero chance...........

I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021.

-Noah Smith, contemplating world domination

On intentional scheduling...............

 

Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.

But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.

-Cal Newport, as posted here

On big, shiny ideas..............

 If you find yourself wondering how no one has thought of this before, that’s a warning sign. Chances are, there’s a quiet graveyard of leaders who learned something expensive that you haven’t yet uncovered. Go talk to them.

I’m pro-innovation. I believe in big ideas. But I’m skeptical of shiny ones—too clean, too theoretical, too detached from human realities. The best strategies are forged in constraint, humility, and patience. They’re honest about how many variables they’re trying to solve at once.

-Mike Sharrow, from here

via

How is this even possible..................?

 

....................Roger Daltry turns 82.

Truth....................

 

...............war is a runaway train and we just don't know where it will take us.

Four pundits calmly discussing.........

 

.........................."decapitation strikes".   In the New York Times of all places.

Life its ownself...................

 

....................with a friend called Fish.

 I know intelligence when I see it. I’d recognize a Bigfoot, too, on sight, because it’s about as rare.

prolong and multiply.............

 

To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor. The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a person alone reading a book that interests them; and all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, are only valuable in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes.

-C. S. Lewis, as culled from here

downstream......................

 

And that’s the funny thing: so many of our problems aren't even the actual problem. They are the downstream effect of some deeper, unseen problem. And the work to actually fix the problem usually has way less to do with fixing and way more with simply learning how to see it clearly in the first place.

-Mark Manson, from this episode