have the genius..............

 

     We should all engage in capitalism in this country.  In the United States, we believe capital belongs in the hands of the people.  Communism teaches that capital belongs in the hands of the state.  This is a great difference in ideology.  Communism seems to be based on the idea that humans are too stupid to know what to do with capital, so it should all be given to the state to manage.

    In our country, we believe the knowledge of what to do with capital resides in the populace.  The people have the genius to come up with ideas for goods and services for the marketplace.  This philosophy has built a dynamic enterprise known as capitalism and has created an abundance of opportunities.

-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life

Let's blame Napoleon...........

 

For most of human history, children learned by living.  A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough.  A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory.  Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom.  Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself.  No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours.  Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.

Then Prussia lost a war.  1806.  Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt.  The Prussian government blamed their people.   Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human.  So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.

The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history.  Children were sorted by age like industrial products.  Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.

The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told.  Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.

It worked so well that America imported it wholesale.  Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system.  He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."

-Stan Taylor

thinking about burnout.................

 

The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.

-Eric Barker, from this post

Please.........................

 

America may have a sick political system and an economy that does not work well for many, but it is distinctly different, and in many ways better than its prime competitors. Our legacy, and our future, lies in large part in preserving that system without falling into the trap of centralized autocracy.

-Joel Kotkin, from this edition

focus on creation.......................

 

     Debates over wealth differentials and inequality are important for every society as we seek to reduce poverty and guarantee opportunity for all citizens.  Yet capitalism is much like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."  Capitalism does produce wealth inequalities but has also proven to be the most successful system at wealth creation and opportunity in history.  The focus should not be on wealth concentration alone but economic and social barriers to wealth creation.

-Jonathan Turley, Rage and The Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

If you have ever found yourself trapped..........

 

.............in phone-system hell and would have willingly given anything just to talk to a real, live person, this may make sense to you:

Will AI make our practice more efficient in the future? Definitely. It already is in some ways and we’ll certainly implement more AI-based efficiency tools over time. But AI isn’t going to fix people problems and people problems are eternal.

-Ben Carlson, from here

Internally stable...............

 

Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome's success rested far more on its political system.  For him the Republic's constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom from the frequent revolution and civil strife that had plagued the Greek city-states.  Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival.  It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war.

-Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus

anti-fragileness as a goal.............

 

The goal for both your body and finances is to make them anti-fragile systems. Growing stronger through controlled stress to avoid collapse under reckless intensity is the North Star for amplifying wealth and optimal health.

-Tony Isola, from here

Scaling.......................

 

     Kroc sees the genius behind the Speedee Service System.  The genius isn't only in its ability do deliver a perfect burger within seconds.  The true genius is that it can be replicated nearly anywhere on planet Earth.  And that, as we know, is exactly what Ray Kroc did.  He took the Speedee Service System and went big time, bugger than even the brothers had anticipated.  He applied their methodology to thousands of McDonald's restaurants across the globe.  The brothers started with one store in 1937.  By 2020, there were almost forty thousand across the globe. . . .

Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.

-Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

For those of you who care................

 

...........about the future of the Federal Reserve.

no replays.......................

 

It is often said that history provides us with no action replays.  It is not given to controlled experiments.  We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right.  In fact, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

a revolution............

 

Law's reputation as a brilliant economist rests on some pamphlets he authored a decade or so after his escape to the Continent.  In his Essay on a Land Bank (c. 1703-4) and Money and Trade Considered (1705), the fugitive Scot displayed novel insights about the nature of money.  Money, he said, did not derive its value from precious metals, as people like Locke believed.  Rather, money was simply a yardstick of value; or, as he put it, "Money is not the Value for which Goods are exchanged, but the Value by which they are exchanged."  This clever switching of the prepositions—by in place of for—amounted to a monetary revolution.  In essence, he was saying that since money lacked intrinsic value it need not be backed by gold or other precious metals.

     A constant theme in Law's writings is that trade depends on the circulation of credit, and that credit was "only lost by a scarcity of Money."  Here Law anticipates later monetarists.  He argued that prosperity could be achieved by establishing a bank that issued paper money, collateralized with land rather than gold and silver.  By severing the link between money and precious metals, Law opened the possibility of a managed currency.

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

curious..................

 

I was born curious.  If that doesn't work for you, figure out your own damn system.

-Charlie Munger

a "system of response".............

 

I rarely worry about taking care of myself in most situations.  This confidence is because I have a "system of response' to address external factors that my instructors have drilled so deeply into my muscle memory I don't have to think about what I'd do in a fight, as my body knows how to respond automatically.  That's the beauty of having a reliable system—it gets the indecisive, overthinking, pausing brain out of the way and lets the body's natural but practiced response mechanism react without the conscious mind slowing things down.

-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable

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

 

............................with Ray Dalio:

No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

To see the big picture, you can't focus on the details.

What I don't know is much greater than what I know.

I have been wrong more times than I can remember, which is why I value diversification of my bets above all else,

. . . throughout time and in all countries, the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of wealth production.  In order to maintain or increase their wealth, they work with the people who have the political power, who are in a symbiotic relationship with them, to set and enforce rules.

-All quotes culled from the early-going of his book, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

Intangibles.....................

 

Economists in the 19th century described production as using tangible resources, notably land, unskilled labor, factories, and business equipment. But by the 21st century, it was evident that intangibles increasingly matter. Human skill level, business strategy, innovation, and the institutional environment determine how wealth gets created.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode

On parking apps........................

 

We do a lot of clerical labor to register ourselves with entities that have figured out ways to intervene in matters that were once direct and straightforward. For example, you have to download the Parkmobile app and set up an account before you can park your car in Santa Cruz, if you are anywhere near the boardwalk. Maybe you are ready to unwind on the beach after a hard day, or maybe you have a carload of kids with low blood sugar, two of whom desperately need to find a bathroom. But you are going to have to find a cell signal, register your credit card and make a password before you can go on your way. Of course, since the app freezes during the final step, you’re not sure you really did pay for parking, or if instead you will be paying an $85 parking ticket at some point in the future. It’s super relaxing. Ask me how I know.

If you don’t have a smart phone, you are out of luck. You may be paying taxes to maintain the street but you can’t park on it, since you are not quite a full citizen.

-Matthew B. Crawford, from this episode

artful dodgers.............................

 

People hunger for meaning. The majority of them want to go home at night with the sense that their presence that day made a positive difference.

-Michael Wade, from here

buying in.........................

 

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in.  Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.

-Bill Watterson

Living better than the Royalty of old..........

 The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

-from this Charles C. Mann essay