wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

On aging like a fine wine...............

 

..................without becoming a burden.

A potential speedbump for AI.........?

 

The 19th century disruptions were severe, and many people suffered as their experience and skill set no longer matched the new economy.  But eventually everyone, from the poorest to the rich, were better off for letting the industrial revolution run its course.

But in the 19th century, the disrupted were essentially powerless.  What happens this time around, though, when the disrupted are the ruling elite themselves?  These potentially disrupted professions include lawyers and doctors who already have shown themselves very willing to organize to block innovation, squash competition, and protect their high pay.

-Warren Meyer, from this blog post

Stoop.........................

 

As they were making their way out, they went through a narrow passage and Mather suddenly warned, "Stoop! Stoop!"  Franklin, not understanding the exhortation, bumped his head on a low beam.  As was his wont, Mather turned it into a homily" "Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high.  Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you will miss many hard thumps."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

heads up...........................

 The new urban paradigm elevated efficiency and central control above privacy, local autonomy, class diversity, and broad-based property ownership.  The same oligarchs who dominate our commercial culture, seek to profit from manipulating our moods, and influence the behavior of our children want to structure our living environment as well.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Having fun with.............................

 ...................................historians:

. . . And what I found truthfully shocked me because I saw our society well on the road to crisis. Of course, our society is quite different from ancient Rome or medieval France and even pre-Civil War United States. But at a more abstract level, the drivers of instability were already working full throttle. So that was one of the reasons why I decided to publish this forecast. And I just want to emphasize that I’m not a prophet. This was a scientific prediction. 

BW: What was the reaction when you predicted that? 

PT: There was, frankly, disbelief, and it was tinged with a desire to think that I must be wrong because nobody wants to believe in bad predictions. People like Steven Pinker and Max Rosen were making all of these rosy predictions right around the same time. Those predictions were very popular because everybody wants to think there is going to be a happy ending to this story. So, the reaction to my prediction was negative, but it was fine because I had tenure at that point. One of the advantages of American academics is that once you have tenure, you can actually try dangerous, risky, intellectual strategies. And it was really quite remarkable. It was thrilling. 

"apocalypse was in the air"..........

As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age.  Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one's personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people to a life in better harmony with nature.  Environmentalism, said Joel Garreau, has become "the religion of choice for urban atheists."

     Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity.  To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, "apocalypse was in the air."  The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent.  St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries.  Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

flashing red lights...................

     The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives.  If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts.  But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.

      There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education.  Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Motunk, a Harvard progressive.  Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness.  A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

I don't always read Noah Smith................

 ........but I'm glad he is out there writing stuff like this:

Finally, let’s talk about the big risk: financial contagion. Many people will undoubtedly have traumatic memories of 2008, when Lehman’s collapse triggered a systemic meltdown. That is a real possibility, and it’s why the FDIC and other government agencies are probably going to work very hard to make sure SVB’s depositors don’t have to take haircuts.

But there are reasons this is not like the Lehman shock. First of all, in 2008 the big banks were all very exposed to each other — they had all lent each other money against the opaque, illiquid mortgage-backed assets that they had all created and sold to each other. This is just not the case with SVB at all — the financial system as a whole is just not particularly exposed to either SVB’s debt or the assets on SVB’s books. Bank stocks fell on the news about SVB, but this is probably just sentiment.

In general, I’m optimistic about the system’s ability to contain the fallout from SVB. So far the U.S. economy has powered along with record employment and strong growth, even as the tech sector has gone into a slump. There’s not a lot of reason to think that basic pattern will change after this bank run, and the government has every reason to make sure it doesn’t change.

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operate on the diagonal..............

When you're faced with a tough decision, which do you go with: your head or your heart?

     If you chose either one, I'm sorry to say that you missed the point of this rule.  Nowhere is it more important than in decision making to embrace the power of the both/and point of view.

     Rather than head versus heart, how about using an empathetic head?  Or a logical heart?

     It takes practice to see the world this way.  But one of the skills that defines an entrepreneur and an innovator is the capacity to generate new lines of sight.  That means cracking problems open along a new dimension.  It means rejecting old either/or choices and finding new both/and syntheses.  You learn to do that when you operate on the diagonal.  You learn to slice a problem along a new line and then recombine its elements in a fresh way.

-Alan Webber, Rules of Thumb:  52 Truths for Winning at Business Without losing Your Self

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

Argent..................................Hold Your Head Up

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Never saw it coming.....................

 The Economist – a magazine I admire – publishes a forecast of the year ahead each January. Its January 2020 issue does not mention a single word about Covid. Its January 2022 issue does not mention a single word about Russia invading Ukraine. That’s not a criticism – both events were impossible to know when the magazines were likely planned in November and written in December each year. But that’s the point: The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events, are always what you don’t see coming.

-Morgan Housel, as culled from here

An environmental catastrophe....

....................is likely in our future.  As a betting man, I would wager a large sum that it won't be man-made:

     In about 2200 B.C., a major volcanic eruption somewhere far to the north spewed enormous quantities of fine ash into the atmosphere.  If historic eruptions are any yardstick, the debris veiled the sun for months on end, bringing unseasonal cold.  Unfortunately for Ur's lords, the eruption coincided with the beginning of a 278-year drought cycle that affected huge areas of the eastern Mediterranean world and is clearly visible in ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet and the high Andes.  With catastrophic abruptness, the moist Mediterranean westerlies faltered.  Winter rainfall plummeted.  The Euphrates and Tigris floods, starved of rain and snowfall in the distant Anatolian highlands, failed as well.
     The drought turned the once-fertile northern Habur plains by the Euphrates into a near desert.

-Brian Fagan,  The Long Summer:  How Climate Changed Civilization

Endless house cleaning..............

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Zen................................

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Rooting for a turn to the right............

On worry................................

"It would be nice--but I won't for a second hold my breath--if the people who are so very worried about global climate change, which maybe--maybe--will affect our great-grandchildren would worry a little about vastly underfunded public pensions, a disaster which is right around the corner. "

-Craig Newmark, as culled from here

It will be with us....................

Mr. Seefer:  Uh-huh.  Any views on the role of fraud, whether mortgage fraud or other types of fraud in the crisis?

Mr. Buffett:  Well, I mean, there was, obviously, a lot of fraud.  There was fraud on the parts of the borrowers and there was fraud on the part of the intermediaries, in some cases.
      But you'd better not have a system that is dependent on the absence of fraud.  I mean, it will be with us.

-As excerpted from Warren Buffett's testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

Consider yourself warned,............

........................a La Niña lurks and it won't be pretty.  The fun thing about making weather predictions about next summer, instead of climate predictions about ten years from now, is that they are easier to remember.  Full story, with some advice mixed in, here.

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