beyond the bounds.................

All crying, "We will go with you, O Wind!"
The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;
But a sleep oppresses them as they go,
And they end by bidding him stay with them.

Since ever they flung abroad in spring
The leaves had promised themselves this flight,
Who now would fain seek sheltering wall,
Or thicket, or hollow place for the night.

And now they answer his summoning blast
With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,
Or at utmost a little reluctant whirl
That drops them no further than where they were.

I only hope that when I am free,
As they are free, to go in quest
Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life
It may not seem better to me to rest.

-Robert Frost, Misgiving

On finding truth.......................

 If you want to navigate life in an astonishingly successful way, you need to find a lot of truths. Truths are hidden all over, across time, geography, culture, and disciplines. Being a snob about your sources of truth is like amputating mental limbs.

-Eric Jorgenson, from this post

Beware the "correct solution".................

 One idea Friedman articulates better than almost anyone else is how advocacy of the market mechanism is (or at least can and should be) rooted in epistemic humility. It’s not just society that is unfathomably complex – the individuals who make up society are also complex and multifaceted ways technocratic policy can never hope to reflect. His advocacy of markets can be paraphrased as “Look, this social problem is extraordinarily complicated. I don’t know what the best solution is. In fact, even talking about a ‘best’ solution may be senseless, because different solutions will work better for different people and different circumstances. The best approach is to let a thousand flowers bloom and give people the space to work out for themselves how to solve their issues in a way best suited to their own needs and desires.” To be a technocrat is to deny that a problem is too complex for you to understand, to believe that there is a “correct” solution, that you in particular know what that solution is, and that you can effectively use policy to implement that solution by altering the behavior of people you’ve never met in ways you can reliably predict. If you reject the simple-society ontology of a naive realist, you see these kinds of claims as incredibly hubristic. But these are the claims one has to make to advocate a technocratic policy.

-Kevin Corcoran, talking about this book:

On becoming.....................

 .................."a scientist of yourself."

Short-term results can undermine long-term development.

Difficulty isn’t a sign that you aren’t learning, but ease is. Sorry.

understands..........................

 

The moon is a loyal companion.  It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

-Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Confronting head on...............

 ..............................the community.

Wandering damage.................

 The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

-as extracted from here

Happy Anniversary Sweetie...............

Eric Clapton...............................Wonderful Tonight

 

Rascal Flatts.......................Bless the Broken Road

 

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

Seals and Crofts......................Diamond Girl album

 

Surfing...................

 .............................................the APOD site:

A worthy goal...................

 

Wisdom...........................

 I’ve given up on trying to avoid 3:00 a.m. thoughts.  Instead, over the years, I’ve tried to channel them to a more productive use.

-more here

More wisdom....................

 Assumptions are clouds with teeth.

-more here

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

Grand Funk Railroad...We're An American Band album

 

Funny how our minds work....................

 

Happy Valentine's Day.......

 

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

Fleetwood Mac..........Heroes Are Hard To Find

 

A missing piece...................

       Clouds never truly disappear.  They change form.  They turn into rain and become part of the ocean, and then evaporate and return to being clouds.

       The same is true of art.

      Art is a circulation of energetic ideas.  What makes them appear new is that they are combined differently each time they come back.  No two clouds are the same.

     This is why, when we are struck by a new piece of art, it can resonate on a deeper level.  Perhaps this is the familiar, coming back to us in an unfamiliar form.  Or maybe it is something unknown that we didn't realize we were looking for.  A missing piece in a puzzle that has no end.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Fortune...............

      Thus we are quite wont to say, with reason, that events and outcomes depend for the most part, especially in war, on Fortune, who will not fall into line and subject herself to our reason and foresight, as these lines say:       

                    But if you take it rightly, it seems that our counsels and deliberations depend just as much on Fortune, and that she involves our reason also in her confusion and uncertainty.  "We reason rashly and inconsiderately," says Timaeus in Plato, "because like ourselves, our reason has in it a large element of chance."

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 47

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

Bob Dylan......Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid soundtrack

 

Heart.....................

 The enemies of those struggling for freedom and democracy are not man. They are discrimination, dictatorship, greed, hatred, and violence, which lie within the heart of man.  These are the real enemies of men - not man himself.

-Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King, Jr, from here

a voice....................

 Open a book and a voice speaks.  A world, more or less alien, or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.

-Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things

A significant economic development project....

     Abraham Lincoln, his best friend Joshua Speed later recalled, said that his highest ambition at the time "was to become the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois."  Clinton, the sixth governor of New York, was the driving force behind the first great American infrastructure project, perhaps the most consequential until the Interstate Highway System - the Erie Canal.  Clinton saw this project as a means of preventing states in the West from detaching themselves from the Union.  The canal would "bind the union together by indissoluble ties" because the people would be "habituated to frequent intercourse and beneficial inter-communication," and all Americans would be "bound together by the golden ties of commerce and the adamantine chains of interest."  The canal, also, and inadvertently, helped to bring down the old order in Europe.  By bringing cheap wheat from America's Great Plains, the canal struck at the roots of Europe's landed aristocracy.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York chauvinist, delighted in saying that the canal did more than Europe's socialist movements did to upend Europe's class structure.  Such are the unanticipated caroms of economic forces when they are allowed the freedom to flow.

- George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

Editor's note:   Calling Will (or DeWitt Clinton) on some bullshit here.  For all his high-minded talk, one suspects Clinton's real motive was to move goods from Ohio, via the canal and the linked waterways, through the Port of New York.  Prior to the canal, Philadelphia was the leading port and economic driver.  After the canal, that title moved to New York City.

On a related note, the Age of the Canal was very brief - maybe thirty years,  The coming of the railroads, a far more important and consequential "infrastructure project," put the canals out of business fairly quickly.  

Cheating at golf..................

 The benefit of the doubt is priceless. And yet people waste it, every day.

-Seth Godin, from here

Talking about money............

 So the goal here is to have a healthy relationship with money. You don’t want the porridge to be too hot or too cold, but just right. How do you know when you have a healthy relationship with money? When you no longer stress about money. People who spend too much experience stress—they’re always worried about how to make the next credit card payment. People who spend too little experience stress—they’re agonizing over every penny. The goal is not only not to experience stress about money, but to not even think about it at all. I have an assignment for you: try to go a week without even thinking about money. I bet you can’t do it. It’s a lot harder than you think. Everywhere we go we are bombarded by financial decisions. Shit, the price of gas is high these days. Shit, Chipotle is $20 nowadays. Shit, my HOA dues went up this month. Do any of these things cause you stress? If so, that provides an insight into your psychology.

-Jared Dillian, from this post

Once again........................

...........................................Kevin Kelly

Recipe for success: under-promise and over-deliver.

It’s not an apology if it comes with an excuse. It is not a compliment if it comes with a request.

Be governed not by the tyranny of the urgent but by the elevation of the important.

The foundation of maturity: Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.

A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea.

Being wise means having more questions than answers.

Compliment people behind their back. It’ll come back to you.

Most overnight successes — in fact any significant successes — take at least 5 years. Budget your life accordingly.

You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

Your best response to an insult is “You’re probably right.” Often they are.

The worst evils in history have always been committed by those who truly believed they were combating evil. Beware of combating evil.

If you can avoid seeking approval of others, your power is limitless.

When brainstorming, improvising, jamming with others, you’ll go much further and deeper if you build upon each contribution with a playful “yes — and” example instead of a deflating “no — but” reply.

Work to become, not to acquire.

On the importance of beer........

 As early as 1650, in England and America, Adams men had made their living as malsters, steeping, drying, sweating, and kilning barley to be fermented into beer.  It was a messy, exacting, labor-intensive business at which Samuel Adams Sr. had splendidly succeeded.  At the time of his son's birth, the family occupied a stately home on what is today Purchase Street, with a commanding ocean view, an observatory, a wharf that bore the family name, various outbuildings, and an orchard.  The estate fronted Boston's sparkling harbor; a garden sloped to the shore.  Even a non-admirer was impressed.  Samuel Adams Sr. had - in an intricate business, practiced on a modest scale, supplying Boston housewives with the malt with which they brewed beer - "accumulated a surprising amount of money."

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams

Evergreen.......................

      He closed on a note of Wilsonian laissez faire.  "I hope the Doctor does not think there is anything seriously the matter with your sister.  Do not let him do much to her.  I am more afraid of remedies than diseases."

-Walter Bagehot, from a November 22, 1857 letter

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

ZZ Top..........................................Tres Hombres

 

Peace.............................

In my own personal experience, the place I end up the most is wanting to be at peace.

Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.  You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want.  But peace us what you want most of the time.  If you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems.  But there are unlimited external problems.  

The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. 

-The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

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

 It is our theory that the people own the government, not that the government should own the people.

-attributed to Calvin Coolidge

Breathe deeply..................

     On July 5, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge, who was born of the Fourth of July, 1872, spoke in Philadelphia to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Coolidge was more learned than his cultured despisers know and more learned than most of them are.  He translated Dante's Inferno as a wedding gift for his wife, he read Cicero in Latin, and there is no extant evidence that he ever said "the business of America is business."  That day in Philadelphia he spoke "to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound."  The founding of the United States, he said, represented a "new civilization...a new spirit...more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual" than any in Europe.  Coolidge said "life in a new and open country" had given rise to "aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position."  These aspirations. "decreed by the very laws of human nature," testified to the fact that "man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny."  The Declaration's "great truths were in the air" Americans breathed.

-George F. Will,  The Conservative Sensibility

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

Chicago................................................Chicago VI

The cows. Next question..............

 

Boring is not all that bad.................

 Gambling at the casino is a form of entertainment. Successful investing is not supposed to be entertaining.

Following the markets can be a form of entertainment as long as you don’t act on every impulse but the act of investing itself should not be exciting. In fact, good investing should be relatively boring.

Investors need to remember this when they’re in search of investment advice as well.

If you’re taking recommendations from people in the financial media you must understand the difference between entertainment and advice.

-Ben Carlson, from here

Regrets............

 But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.  And I knew that that would haunt me every day. So when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.

-Jeff Bezos, from here

Concentration.................

 A million in the hands of a single banker is a great power; he can at once lend it where he will, and borrowers can come to him, because they know or believe that he has it.  But the same sum scattered in tens and fifties through a whole nation is no power at all:  no one knows where to find it or whom to ask for it.  Concentration of money in banks, though not the sole cause, is the principal cause which has made the Money Market of England, so exceedingly rich, so much beyond that of other countries.

-Walter Bagehot, from his 1873 book, Lombard Street:  A Description of the Money Market

A singular work of art...................

      Creativity is not a rare ability.  It is not difficult to access.  Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human.  It is out birthright.  And it's for all of us. . . .

      Regardless of wheter or not we're formally making art, we are all living as artists.  We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience for ourselves and others based on this information set.  Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing process of creation. . . .

     Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression.  You exist as a creative being in a creative universe.  A singular work of art.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

a common vice...........

      I should be prone to excuse our people for having no other pattern and rule of perfection than their own manners and customs, for it is a common vice, not of the vulgar only but of almost all men, to fix their aim and limit by the ways to which they were born.

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 49

An all-time great scene................

A look at productivity................

 Sometimes “productivity” feels like a country you’ve heard a lot about but never thought you’d get a chance to visit.

-from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post

the watermark.......................

      Adams banked on the sage deliberations of a band of hard-working farmers reasoning their way toward rebellion.  That was how democracy worked.  He dreaded disunity. "Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction," he warned.  There was nothing feigned about his zeal for liberty, "the best cause," he assured his wife, "that virtuous men contend for."  In his case it was bred deep in the Calvinist bone.  Adams could not live in the house with a slave and arranged for the one who arrived on his doorstep to be freed.  He refused to believe that prejudice and private interest would ultimately trample knowledge and benevolence.  Self-government was in his view inseparable from governing the self; it demanded a certain asceticism.  He wrote anthem after anthem to the qualities he believed essential to a republic—austerity, integrity, selfless public service—qualities that would become more military than civilian.  The contest was never for him less than a spiritual struggle.  It is impossible with Adams to determine where piety ended and politics began: the watermark of Puritanism shines through everything he wrote.  Faith was there from the start, as was the scrappy, iconoclastic spirit, as were the daring, disruptive excursions beyond the law.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams

This could catch on...........

 

test...................

 

Martin Gurri is a national treasure..............

 American politics resembles a three-way scrum. An institutional center, dominated by a guardian class of elites, who manage pretty much everything in modern society, faces persistent assaults from the populist Left and Right.

On close inspection, the three contending parties can be reduced to two ideological streams: the politics of control and the politics of incoherence. Terrified by the rise of populism, the elites have hardened into what the French would call an “extreme center,” claiming a right to rule in perpetuity by reason of its superior virtue and moderation. Democracy has been redefined as the electoral triumph of the center. Candidates from outside the fold are deemed “semi-fascist” and thus illegitimate. . . .

The politics of control unite the extreme center and left populism: at present, the two factions share an uneasy alliance. This is only partly a contradiction. The center is ideologically exhausted and requires justification for control. In identity and environmentalism, the Left supplies that justification. The center is also aware that institutional power has decayed and verges on collapse. By its ability to summon the digital mob, the Left can offer social control over a restless public. At any rate, left populism today is not revolutionary but performative: it needs the media to build a proper stage on which to strut. The young rebels are often the children of the elites, getting credentialed in moral drama before they ascend to leadership.

-as culled from this post

While wandering through the Intertunnel....

 ..............a few interesting things were found:

The rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” creates incentives to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. Poverty is the inevitable result.

-via Cafe Hayek

------------------------------------------------------------

Unprecedented actions on the scale that we experienced in 2020-2022 will bring unexpected results in 2023.  So, while we never want to ignore a number like the January jobs report, we have to question how much is signal and how much is noise.

The economy is still absorbing the money printed during the pandemic.  Inflation has not been eradicated, the Fed is highly unlikely to loosen policy anytime soon, and earnings are likely to fall as all the stimulus wears off.  That’s not a recipe for a simple forecast or a soft landing.  Like the Super Bowl, until the game is played no one knows exactly what will happen.  Count us less bullish than conventional wisdom.

-via Brian Wesbury

------------------------------------------------------------

You learn something new every day; as part of the settlement to the Spanish-American War - Spain agreed to sell the US the Philippines for $20 million. Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world at the time, offered to reimburse the government $20 million if they would give the Philippines their freedom instead of making it a US Protectorate. The government rejected his kind offer...

-via and via

------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't care which party is in power, the State of the Union address has become an embarrassment.  It should be abandoned.

-via the Execupundit

Now........................

 

People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.

-Russell Brand

That didn't take long..................

via 

On the importance of the whole picture.....

via

About those meetings.................

 Accenture's team also discovered that something that nearly every meeting does is a waste of time: introductions.  The data show that everyone except for the person speaking is neurologically frustrated during these recitations.  Instead of an introduction, Accenture now puts names on paper tents in front of attendees. Using name tents also avoids "introduction creep" in which one person offers an in-depth description of his or her job, career and personal goals, sporting activities, children, and dog.  People are able to meet each other during frequent breaks without formal introduction.

-Paul J. Zak, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

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

 ..........................with Charlie Munger:

The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous.

Knowing what you don't know is more useful that being brilliant.

Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.

People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think.

Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand—you must learn to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds.

My idea of shooting fish in a barrel is draining the barrel first.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

I succeeded because I have a long attention span.

It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can't stand to wait.

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.

-all quotes lifted from The Tao of Charlie Munger

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

Mike Oldfield.........................the Tubular Bells album

My Sweetie and I just returned from...

 .....a quick trip to Jupiter and Venice.  Florida that is.

But not all of us........................

. . . we have 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day from now until the end of this decade.

-from this Ben Carlson post, in which he offers answers to six significant questions about the economy

Content...........................

 I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation.  We are complex enough, interesting enough.  What we have learned, limited as we must assume it to be, is wonderful even in the fact of its limitations.

-Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness Of Things

image via

Not even going to pretend (or try) to understand...

 

“What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”

“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

-Jacques Lacan, all quotes from here

image via

On thinking..............................

 32. Develop your thinking: treat it as a skill. 

33. Observe your thinking to refine it and get more bang per buck. 

34. Use proactive thinking: what do I need to anticipate? 

35. Use critical thinking: what do I need to do better? 

36. Use lateral thinking: what do I need to do differently?

-Nicholas Bate, from this list

Be wary..........................

 

.................................of the moving goalposts.

Just the ticket.........................

 

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

Hootie & the Blowfish..........Cracked Rear View

 

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

 ..........................with Kevin Kelly:

When a child asks an endless string of "why?" questions, the smartest answer is, "I don't know, what do you think?"

To be wealthy, accumulate all those things money can't buy.

Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others.  The reverse is hell for everyone.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

Sustained outrage makes you stupid.

Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest possible therapy ever.

There is no limit on better.  Talent is distributed unevenly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you'll get.  Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don't have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

Meanwhile, at Davos................

 

Can I get an amen................?

 

Really good question...........

 What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're just squandering it?

-Naval Ravikant

Capability.......................

We have to deal with things that we're capable of understanding.

I'm really better at determining my level of incompetency and then just avoiding that.

You have a limited amount of time and talent and you have to allocate it smartly.

-Charlie Munger, as culled from here

And we take safety for granted..............

      In our common speculations we do not enough remember that interest on money is a refined idea, and not a universal one.  So far indeed is it from being universal, that the majority of saving persons in most countries would reject it.  Most savings in most countries are held in hoarded specie.  In Asia, in Africa, in South America, largely even in Europe, they are thus held, and it would frighten most of the owners to let them out of their keeping.  An Englishman—a modern Englishman at least—assumes as a first principle that he out to be able to "put his money into something safe that will yield 3 per cent," but most saving persons in most countries are afraid to "put their money" into anything.  Nothing is safe in their minds, indeed, in most countries, owing to a bad Government and a backward industry, no investment, or hardly any, really is safe.

-Walter Bagehot, as excerpted from Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

Action.....................................

 Most people drift through life, accepting whatever they can get without drawing on the forces of their minds.  Lake of a Definite Major Purpose is the most deadly form of personal limitation.  It has been plainly written in the records of men that all who demand something definite find ways and means of getting it if the persist in their demands.  An important part of persistence is action—the sort of action I have been talking about; action in making a start; action in keeping on going, even when the going is hard; action in making a new start when one is temporarily defeated.  Action, action, action!  Let that word burn itself into your consciousness until it stands out like the shining sun on a cloudless day.

-Andrew Carnegie, from here

slandering Pygmies..................

 The United States today stands as a living contradiction to the ‘great man theory of history’. For the US is a great country led by small minds. In recent times, it has been ruled by a narcissistic moral reprobate and it is now being run by a cognitively deficient and scandal-plagued politician. There is a growing feeling, particularly among the young, that today’s America is diminished. Yet the US remains the world’s premier power, and its last best hope against a rising authoritarian tide.

So, how does an America led by mediocrities succeed? The secret sauce lies in two great assets – America’s geography and its constitution.

-Joel Kotkin, as he starts this post

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

Jimmy Buffett...............................Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

 

Extraordinary...............

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 

-Warren Buffett

A rule from Benjamin Franklin..............

 3. To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.

-As cut and pasted from here