play your own game...............

Personally, I cringe when I hear that individual investors are “disadvantaged” because they don’t have access to things like private equity and that the only answer is to provide them with access through the “democratization of finance.”

Why?

Because the answer to a lack of resources is not to follow others. Rather, the answer is to be different. To be creative. To think outside the box. . . . a lack of resources means you have something they don’t — a license to be creative. It means you have the chance to play your own game, do things differently, and adhere to a game plan unique to you.

-Ted Lamade, from this episode

About interest..................

 

     "The emergency of interest to incentivize lending is the most significant of all innovations in the history of finance," writes the financial historian William Goetzmann.  This point is well made.  Finance allows people to transact across time.  The farmer borrows barley to sow his fields but must wait until harvest before repaying the debt.  Industrial processes—even the light crafts-based industries of the Ancie4nt Near East—require time in production from raw materials to the sale of finished goods.  A text from third-millennium Mesopotamia shows that the preparation of cloth took over a year.  Foreign trade consumes a lot of time.  When capital is tied up in industry or trade, the interest charge bears some connection to the time used in production.

     In any society with private property, whether in Mesopotamia or later civilizations, the payment of interest is required to induce people to lend their resources.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Natural Resources..............

 

In speaking of the great resources of this country it should be kept in mind that the greatest of these is not the money in the banks, nor the minerals in the ground, nor the trees in the forest, nor the richness of our soil; but it is the mental attitude, and the imagination, and the pioneering spirit of the men who have mixed experience and education with these raw materials, thereby transferring them into various types of useful service for our own people and for the people of other nations.

-Andrew Carnegie, as quoted here

Abundance....................

 Resources (as opposed to raw materials) are created and produced by human ingenuity. And so because human creativity is open-ended, the notion that there is a fixed amount of resources on earth, or even in any region of earth, is economically mistaken.

-Don Boudreaux

their special skill....................

 Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that these activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.

-Frederic C. Lane

From a defense of incidental plagiarism....

     We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity.  Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength:  if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.  Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and thing and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences.  It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.  Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

-Oliver Sacks,  The River Of Consciousness, from the chapter The Fallibility of Memory

God knows, this is true......................

“You can’t have a bunch of wussy sand that falls apart when you squeeze it,” Robertson says.

-Althouse has the rest of the story - here.

Improve...................................

Agricultural efficiencies.......................

.........................................or, government is just another name of the way we distort markets together.  An interesting take of water and deserts and cotton - here.

I bet you didn't know................................

..................................................there is a sand shortage.

In praise of.............................................

........................fossil fuels.    Bet you didn't see that coming.

"Notice, too, the ways in which fossil fuels have contributed to preserving the planet. As the American author and fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein points out in a bravely unfashionable book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” the use of coal halted and then reversed the deforestation of Europe and North America. The turn to oil halted the slaughter of the world’s whales and seals for their blubber. Fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food, thus feeding a growing population while sparing land for wild nature."

-full post from my favorite optimist is here.

Can I get an Amen.....................................?

 It’s easy to be pessimistic when one doesn’t understand economics or that the innovative nature of the human mind is the ultimate resource. The incentives and price system inherent in the market process ensure that innovation will continue to improve our world. But Simon wrote that two things were certain: first, “humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way”; second, “humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.''

-As excerpted from #5 on this list of Six Reasons We Don't Know How Good We Have It.

One of the reasons us History majors tend to be optimistic is that the historical default condition for most of humanity is to be cold (my Eurocentric background is showing), wet, hungry, and poor.  It is pretty clear that economic systems matter, and the cold, wet, hungry, and poor thing is just an option these days.

thanks craig

A resource............................................

“I never viewed money as being ‘my money.’ I always saw it as ‘the money’.  It’s a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.” 
-Louis CK, as excerpted from here

On limits..........................................

History's littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation.  The reason is pretty straightforward:  scarcity if often contextual.  Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit.  If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit.  From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce.  But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I've suddenly got new reach.  Problem solved.  Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism.  It can make the once scarce the now abundant.
-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  Abundance:  The Future Is Better Than You Think

For a more recent application of "technology is a resource-liberating mechanism," think about horizontal drilling and the liberation of shale oil.  One take on the subject is here.

Those pesky humans are at it again.......

From Via Meadia comes this interesting nugget:

"Water scarcity has long been a favorite topic for the Chicken Littles of the world. But doomsayers who predict a coming global shortage of freshwater fail to account for one of the strongest forces on our planet today: human ingenuity."

Full post on Israeli water desalination is here.

Why Malthusians will always be wrong...........

They never have caught on to just how ingenious and resourceful us humanoids can be:

original blog post is here

Libraries.................

“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.” 
-Zig Ziglar

"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."
-Henry Ward Beecher 

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” 
-Walter Cronkite

"The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history."
-Carl T. Rowan 

"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
-Thomas Jefferson

“To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.” 
-Cicero

“When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.” 
-Rita Mae Brown

"Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest."
-Lady Bird Johnson 

"Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written.  And guess what?  It's all available.  All you have to do is go to the library."
-Jim Rohn

"these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesman and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges."
-Benjamin Franklin

This IS interesting.................................

Spengler welcomes China to the party.....................

English-language media completely ignored a noteworthy statement that led Der Spiegel’s German-language website October 12, a call for China to “take on responsibility as a world power” in the Middle East. Penned by Bernhard Zand, the German news organization’s Beijing correspondent, it is terse and to the point: now that China imports more oil from the Middle East than any other country in the world, it must answer for the region’s security. “America’s interest in the Middle East diminishes day by day” as it heads towards energy self-sufficiency, wrote Zand, adding:

China’s interest in a peaceful Middle East is enormous, by contrast. Beijing is not only the biggest customer of precisely those oil powers who presently are fanning the flames of conflict in Syria; as a VIP customer, Beijing has growing political influence, which it should use openly. The word of the Chinese foreign minister has just as much weight in Tehran and Riyadh as that of his American counterpart.

Really good news on the helium front.......

You may not have been aware of the looming crisis, so news that it has been averted may not qualify as news.  Still, for those of you who believe in the law of unintended consequences, and for those of you who fancy helium balloons, it's an interesting story.  Update is here.

thanks tyler

How big is big.......................?

The always interesting Via Meadia blog, the home of one of my favorite bloggers, Walter Russell Mead,  has a post up about China and water and big, big problems.  In said post can be found this excerpt:

"The Gobi desert is expanding by an area almost the size of Rhode Island every year."

Hmmm..............I don't know if that is a big deal or not.  As usually happens at times like this, the Oracle Google was consulted.   Here are a few tidbits:

The Gobi, at 500,000 + square miles, is the largest desert in Asia, but only the fifth largest on the planet.  Can you guess the largest?  If your first reaction was  "Sahara",  we both got it wrong.    Apparently sand is not a requirement for a desert.   The largest desert in the world is the Antarctic (at 5,339,573 square miles) and the second largest is the Arctic.  Next comes the Sahara, followed by the Arabian desert.    The tenth largest is the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and a goodly bit of Utah.

As it turns out, Rhode Island, the smallest state, only has 1,045 square miles of area.  Doesn't seem like that big a deal to add 1,045 to 500,000 every year.  Not much of a growth rate percentage wise.  Unless,  of course, you live there.  We live in Licking County, which has 688 square miles of area.   If some desert came and ate our county in a shade less than two years,  I would think that was a pretty big deal.