 |
| Claude Monet 1888 oil on canvas Haystacks at Giverny, the Evening Sun |
The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Shortly after Jackson's death, one unforgiving New York Whig damned the General as "the undisputed head of a violent, proscriptive party . . . He did more to break down the republican principles of the government and enslave the minds of the people than all the rulers who went before him." Here reigned a virtual dictator, he continued, a master of "that pernicious popular homage called popularity." Fifteen yeas later, however, in the perilous secession winter of 1860, another Yankee, a New Hampshire Democrat, thought that only an indomitable Jackson-like leader could save the nation. "Would to Heaven," he wrote, "we had another Andrew Jackson . . . at the head of this Government . . . instead of James Buchanan." Both of these observers anticipated, in their divergent views, a sharp and seemingly endless debate over the meaning of power and populism in Jackson's America. The notion of the people preventing social elites and financial aristocrats from bullying, bestriding. or otherwise buying Congress is altogether attractive. And yet common man democracy's erratic energy collaterally legitimized Indian removal, slavery's expansion, and the troubling growth of presidential fiat. In important moments, as when Jackson ignored the Supreme Court in the Cherokee case or refused to honor the government's obligation to deposit public monies in the National Bank, the rule of law itself appeared imperiled.
..........if it wasn't written by Freddie deBoer, I would have stopped reading. I am glad I kept reading.
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever.
The 1990's were a nice decade for most. Strong American-provided security. No serious international conflicts. Global trade penetrated deep into the former Soviet space as well as into countries that had done their best to sit out the Cold War. The cost of the American overwatch and market access steadily expanded, but in an environment of peace and prosperity it all seemed manageable. Germany reunified. Europe reunified. The Asian tigers roared. China came into its own, driving down the price of consumer products. Resource producers, whether in Africa, Latin America, or Down Under, made scads of money helping more parts of the world industrialize. Globe-spanning supply chain lines made the Digital Revolution not simply possible, but inevitable. Good times. We all came to think of it as normal.
It is not.
The post-Cold War era is possible only because of a lingering American commitment to a security paradigm that suspends geopolitical competition and subsidizes the global Order. With the Cold War security environment changed, it is a policy that no longer matches needs. What we all think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history. That makes it terribly fragile.
And it is over.
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
This garbled argument aligned with Jackson's sense of persecution and long-standing unwillingness to respect the sincerity and moral seriousness of his opponents. He suspected the abolitionists of using slavery as a stalking horse, rather, to attack his administration. In Jackson's world of finely spun conspiracies, the rich and influential feared democracy and threw whatever they could—internal improvements, the Bank, and now abolitionism—to knock him down. He took seriously only his own ethical concerns, and the cares of others were variously dismissed as mere opportunism.
-David S. Brown, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson
Another example of a foundational value: I don't believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. If I'm doing business with somebody and they thing in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don't want to do business with them anymore. All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I'm going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
. . . a man’s quality is tested by his ability to act contrary to his own interests whenever it becomes necessary.
-from this Hammock Papers post on noblesse oblige
A dismissive Henry Clay once described the Democratic Party to a small group of Louisville notables as "the Jackson party . . . a mere personal party." And certainly as the 1832 presidential election approached, the coalition, entering only its second national contest, lacked Jackson's prestige and popularity. What is more, the president seemed to will even his unfolding opposition into existence. The National Republicans attacked the Indian Removal Act and Bank veto while stressing the emanating danger of executive usurpation, thus making Jackon himself the main campaign issue. Certainly no single individual did more to provide a rallying cry for enemies and allies alike during this pregnant period of partisan formation.
-David S. Brown, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.
-Andrew Jackson, from his Bank Veto message
First, risk is highest when everything seems perfect.
Second, the conditions that create prosperous outcomes often plant the seeds of their own unwindings.
Third, risk happens fast.
Fourth, boring is often a feature, not a flaw. Leaving money on the table isn’t a bad thing if it provides a margin for error.
Fifth, there is never one single catalyst to any existential risk.
Sixth, the biggest risks, by their very nature, can’t be forecasted.
Seventh, when you have already achieved “success,” no terminal tail risk is worth it, regardless of the probability.
Eighth, the biggest risks always look obvious in hindsight, yet we never catch them beforehand.
The purpose of technology is to increase the potential for human happiness.
In some sense, “What is technology for?” is an impossible question to answer. Each company or person creates or adopts each very specific technology for a very specific reason – there’s always a Job to Be Done – so the question is impractically grandiose. Pondering the ultimate purpose of technology is like pondering the meaning of life.
Ugliness sold as beauty; lies sold as truth; discrimination sold as diversity. Un-ideas.
........................offers some advice:
Money is way down on the list of things that will make you happy. Freedom of choice is way up at the top of the list. Act accordingly.
I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among "the eminent dead," but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.
Whether it’s the two biggest capital investment announcements in Ohio history in 2022 or the very real statewide manufacturing resurgence, Ohio is on a trajectory for growth and opportunity which most Ohioans haven’t seen in our lifetimes. Governor Mike DeWine is right to say, “It’s Ohio’s time.”
-Rick Platt, as excerpted from here
People who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.
-as culled from here
Controlling your behavior amid uncertainty can be hard enough. Controlling your reactions to other people’s behavior is way harder. Fear is more contagious than any virus, and can instantly push people to react in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a moment prior. . . .
The higher the stakes, the more thoughtful you need to be about those who surround you.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Far from robbing anybody of surplus value, Capitalism is like a benevolent ancestor who, instead of consuming all the port that he could get – as some ancestors did – laid down an enormous cellar of it for the use of future generations. And every one who is now alive in this country, and millions abroad likewise, are now able to help themselves to bottles of the grand old vintage then laid down and now ready for us, crusted, fruity, full of ripe flavour and rich bouquet. For none of us could have been so well off, and many of us could not have been born at all, if Capitalism had not done this deed, and done it judiciously and well.
–Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 1920 p239.
................................................but this is serious.
Their own life force spent in the pursuit of what they believed was important, they now have the means to travel and remember.
-culled from this Joel Hirst post on the coming projected demographic collapse
Trust does not emerge simply because a seller made a rational case why the customer should buy a product or service, or because an executive promises change. Trust is not a checklist. Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust. Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don't trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own gain.
-Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
-attributed to Carl Sagan
 |
| Claude Monet 1883 Port d'Aval, Rough Sea |
 |
| Claude Monet 1883 The Manneport, Cliff at Étretat |
“If the ocean can calm itself, so can you. We are both salt water mixed with air”
Having watched numerous extinction-level events come and go over the years, I’ve observed a few familiar patterns. The common thread, ignoring the prophets of doom, never failed.
Income is obviously different than wealth. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, if you don’t save any of it, you’re not really wealthy.
As we have said before, it's not how much you make, it's what you do with what you make that counts.
The interesting question isn’t whether someone has status. It’s whether they’re gutsy enough to demonstrate it by making things better for others.
..........................and other good stuff may be found here on a regular basis.
Now the world is run by sophists. They think that because they read a few books about people who were great that they are great in their turn. There are two problems with this surmise. One, the people they think were great probably weren't. Secondly, most people are incapable of much more than misremembering and misunderstanding the twaddle they read anyway, because education isn't very rigorous anymore. If you think the world's business is decided by simply choosing wisely between John Galt and Noam Chomsky, I don't know what to say to you. Mozart is never going to show up on American Idol.
-as cut-and-pasted from this Sippican Cottage post
................on San Francisco's reparations plan:
The plan would cost an estimated $600,000 per household. Just out of morbid curiosity about what literally happens to the city if this plan goes through, I’m in favor. Also, after the exodus of people fleeing to avoid this new tax, there’ll be a lot of nice properties around for cheap. I’d like one of those. So let’s do this.
-via
The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.
CONTRA-INDICATOR: Inverse Jim Cramer ETF outperforming market trackers after just 2 weeks. “In the two weeks since its launch, the ‘Inverse Cramer Tracker’ exchange-traded fund (ETF) has been outperforming the market by allowing investors to short any stock CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer recommended buying.”
Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.
It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.
Plus, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.
The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period––already gone.
What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?
What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live
in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?
Whether the photographer, who would forever remain anonymous, felt the conceivably immense pressure we will never know. But with the head of the nation and the soul of the nation's preservation movement, both rugged, demanding, and outspoken men, paired together for a brief time, posted against arguably the nation's most transcendent and iconic landscape, a long journey by train, horseback, and boot from any major city, the stakes in making a good image were high.
-Dean King, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite
Industrialization plus globalization has not only generated the fastest economic growth in history; collectively they have dramatically increased the standard of living of billions of people the world over. Unlike the shockingly unequal preindustrial world, the industrialization/globalization combo has achieved the seemingly impossible duology of enabling the utterly unskilled to live at something above an abused subsistence level while pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and education further and faster and more broadly than ever before. . . .
Botton line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that's when it is working to design. Today's economic landscape isn't so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove the mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our "normal" is going to end, and end soon.
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
Our senses often misperceive data. And our minds don't have the processing power to take in all information surrounding us. Our senses would be overwhelmed by light, color, sound, and smell. We would not be able to distinguish one object from another.
To navigate our way through his immense world of data, we learn early in life to focus on information that appears essential or of particular interest. And to tune out the rest.
As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception: a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utility or survival.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
On November 10, 1954, a story appeared on the front page of the Cornell Daily Sun that began, "The spirit of Prometheus was reincarnated and the campus and the routing of the arts school upset when, yesterday morning, Ed Epstein, '57, made a dramatic horse and buggy appearance for his 10 AM class in Boardman Hall."
As the story explained, the reason I elected this quaint form of transportation was that my driving privileges had been suspended for my sophomore year because I had transgressed the rules by having a car on campus my freshman year. Oddly enough, it was not that difficult finding a buggy in 1954 in Upstate New York. I went to several local farms, and, at the third one, the farmer offered to sell me both the buggy and a horse named Wisconsin for $200. Driving it onto campus had consequences though. I was put on probation and, when I refused to rein in my horse and buggy, double probation. I then gave the buggy and horse to a local farmer, but my probation was not lifted. It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I stopped attending classes, my grades plunged, and the following year I was asked to leave Cornell. I considered it a temporary setback.
-Edward Jay Epstein, Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe
.................give yourself a break:
Here’s a tip for anyone wanting to become a machine of relentless focus: stop trying to become a machine of relentless focus. Despite the officially sanctioned fairy tales, you can’t. Your brain does not work like that. Nice theory — wrong species.
-From this post by Eric Barker
And though correlation is not causation, I submit that we’d save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble in the future if we’d agree to a simple litmus test: Immediately disregard anyone in the business of selling a vision who proudly proclaims they hate reading.
. . . key four is to chase quality of life rather than standard of living (8) key five to freedom is to realise that most-if not all-of what we want, is available to us now if we simply slow down and notice it. (9) Key five is thus don't defer good times. Don't think when. Nor one day. Think now. Build them in now: breaks, walks, conversation, home cooking, reading to the children, learning that language, that project, charity work, learning how to knit (10) key six is to note that people become free every day in an instant when they wake up and realise that the thing for the majority of us in this part of the world is that freedom is a decision not a goal, qualification nor purchase. A decision. And that's pretty damn cool.
We are an infamously mobile nation. That is one of the cornerstones of the American dream and a root cause of our equally infamous stores of optimism. . . . The traits that foreigners both detest and adore in us—our informality, friendliness, instability, and restlessness—owe much to the idea of movement, . . .Will we never tire of the hunt for something better? . . . We can't all be what Virgin Atlantic, in a silky paean to its best customers, dubs the "fast-moving, culture-shaping jetrosexual, who dwells in multiple worlds and time zones" ever-hungry for the new and at home in the placeless metropolis of the airport. But that's no matter, because the possibility is there, and the yearning is deep. . . .It's not so much moving for a job or a love or an ideal that stirs us anymore. It's moving for movement's sake. "Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among coveted values," observes Bauman. The bootless chase continues. What's around the corner?
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
One area where all American steelmakers could maintain absolute, almost religious agreement was on the topic of British steel. British steelmakers were more efficient, and as a result, their rails were cheaper even than Carnegie's. As with the iron industry before, the Americans' collective strategy was equally simple: tariffs. Congress complied. The tariff on a ton of imported British steel started at $28 per ton. Given that Carnegie's first-ever order was fulfilled at $68 per ton, the British would have had to sell steel at $40 per ton, with overseas shipping included, to pay the tariff and match the price in the market. In an era without a personal income tax or corporate income taxes, the federal government relied on duties and tariff generated income for a significant portion of its revenue . . .
Even Carnegie, with all his competitive, Darwinian pride, granted that tariff protection "has played a great part in the development of manufacturing in the United States." . . . But laissez-faire capitalism it was not. The invisible hand of Adam Smith's free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy.
-Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
Whenever I get caught up in my ego battles, I just think of entire civilizations that have come and gone. For example, take the Sumerians. I am sure they were important people and did great things, but go ahead and name me a single Sumerian. Tell me anything interesting or important Sumerians did that lasted. Nothing.
So maybe ten thousand years from now or a hundred thousand years from now, people will say, "Oh yeah, Americans. I've heard of Americans.
You're going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.
..............................to start an argument in a bar:
4) Today’s super-hopped IPAs are close to undrinkable.
7) An important moment in civilizational collapse was when they replaced live action Saturday morning kids’ shows (The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Fury, The Cisco Kid) with cartoons.
8) Today we listen to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, not to mention the Beatles, but fifty years from now no one will listen to today’s rap.
12) If we all went back to dressing like people did in the 1940s and 50s the world would be a better place.
13) Notwithstanding a few worthy practitioners like Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism was basically a mistake.
The bizarre thing about the banking sector is it’s a faith-based system. Sure there are assets and liabilities, checks and balances, rules and regulations but trust plays a larger role than most people think.
-Ben Carlson, reviews some history here
This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.
Most technologies do not fundamentally change us. Consider the contemporary smartphone. It is a flashlight, a music player, a camera, a game console, a fare card, a remote control, a library, a television, a cookbook, a computer—all in one. It hasn't enabled us to do much that's fundamentally new, but it has combined more than a dozen preexisting devices into one, increasing efficiency and access. Important? Ridiculously. But such improvement-based techs do not fundamentally change who we are.
Transport technologies, on the other hand, profoundly alter our relationship with geography.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Before industrial techs remade the world, "urban" areas required nearly a half acre of farmland per resident to prevent starvation—over seven times the land we use today, plus another one hundred times as much area in forestland to produce charcoal to cook and see the population through the winter. It made cities stay small.
------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure you've all heard about Rome's famous roads being one of the greatest achievements of the premodern age. A few points of perspective:
Rome's roads stretched from Glasgow to Marrakech to Baghdad to Odessa, and were roughly equivalent to total length of roads in modern-day . . . Maine. The Roman road network took six centuries—one billion labor-days—to construct, to say nothing of maintenance.
---------------------------------------------------------------
While a camel could move a quarter ton and ox-drawn carts around a tone, even the earliest bulk ships could move several hundred tons at a fraction of the price per ton. The Romans famously imported most of their capital's food from Egypt. Remember those better-than-world-class Roman roads? In 300 CE it cost more to move grain 70 miles on those roads than it did to sail it some 1,400 miles from Egypt to Rome.
----------------------------------------------------------------
The average grocery store today has about forty thousand individual items, up from about two hundred at the dawn of the twentieth century.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Take his concept of utter availability, apply it to absolutely everything, and you now have a glimmer of the absolute connectivity that underpins the modern, globalized economy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
Thousands of years of recorded history present a persistent story of poverty and tyranny, with an occasional experiment in personal freedom and opportunity being fulfillingly productive. If we are to foster the good society and its responsive, efficient economy, intellectual competence must be married to high character. Otherwise, we will defeat ourselves by generating increasingly efficient gulags.
 |
| Claude Monet Frost 1880 Oil on Canvass |
 |
| Claude Monet Frost 1880 Oil on Canvass |
........................................looks like.
........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.
...............there is a pretty big upside:
If you are a legal research assistant, or law clerk, who the lawyers in the firm rely upon for basic legal research, you need to be looking over your shoulder. If, like me, you are a solo lawyer without armies of legal assistants at your beck and call, the playing field just got even more level.
One of the most enjoyable parts of Bagehot's essay is his attack on the pretensions of Gladstone's alma mater. "No one can deny to it very great and very peculiar merits," writes the University of London alumnus of Oxford University. "But certainly it is not an exciting place and its education operates as a narcotic rather than as a stimulant."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
We sometimes struggle with learning because we expect it to be easy. We’d all like to find a silver bullet: a quick, easy shortcut to picking up whatever we want and never forgetting it. The internet teems with blog posts promising you can learn a language in a week or to code in a month or how to play the violin overnight. This is all bull. Learning isn’t just knowing something for a day. It’s deep wisdom that allows you to create, innovate, and push boundaries.
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.
Posts
All Comments
