In business and investing, you want to learn the big lessons about why things behave the way they do without assuming the past is a direct guide to the future, because it’s not – most of the details are not repeatable.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Monday, April 8, 2024
Sunday, April 7, 2024
The trouble with doing.......................
.................economics properly and wisely:
It’s tempting to do economics as if an omniscient and omni-benevolent god were able and willing to hire itself out as the faithful agent to follow the mortal’s policy recommendations. Imagining oneself tapping into god-like knowledge and power is heady, and from that high perch the real-world, with all of its messiness and imperfections, does indeed appear to be in dire need of divine intervention. But economics properly and wisely done . . . takes human nature, including humans’ limited cognitive abilities, as given. Most of the so-called “theoretical exceptions” to the economic case for free trade are relevant only in an alternative reality in which governance of humans’ daily economic and political affairs could actually be turned over to a god or to a mortal transformed into a god.
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
Getting into...........................
................the nitty-gritty of trust:
It’s not a good idea to warily eye everyone like they’re potential contestants on “Who Wants to Betray Me Next?” Studies show expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: “those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.”
Meanwhile, displaying trust in others from the get-go can create the opposite type of self-fulfilling prophecy: people want to prove your trust in them to be justified. Research shows seemingly irrational displays of trust often prove quite rational because it leads others to trust you and not want to let you down.
Opening paragraphs.................
A hundred and fifty-seven castaways on a desert island in the South China Sea, the survivors of the wreck of HMS Diane, which had struck upon an uncharted rock and had there been shattered by a great typhoon some days later: a hundred and fifty-seven, but as they sat there round the edge of a flat bare piece of ground between high-water mark and the beginning of the forest they sounded like the full complement of a ship of the line, for this was Sunday afternoon, and the starboard watch, headed by Captain Aubrey, was engaged in a cricket-match against the Marines, under their commanding officer, Mr. Welby.
-Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation
Trends....................................
.........................................in the housing market (and other worthwhile stuff to think about).
There are 70 million baby boomers and they control something like $70 trillion in assets. We’re looking at 10-15 years of boomers buying places in Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and other warm destinations.
Most of them have paid off mortgages and an obscene amount of home equity. Good luck betting against this trend.
Editor's Note: There is nothing obscene about home equity.
Saturday, April 6, 2024
On the strong dislike of power........
In a now-obscure 1960s BBC interview, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, journalist, and convert to anti-Communism (and later Christianity) declared: “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”
-from this review of Everyday Freedom
magical reinventors.....................
Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
reality based..................
Franklin's humanity was based on no illusions about life—on no sappy opinions about the natural goodness of human beings, on no false hopes for the future. Rather, it was based on seeing the world as it really is, and not as we want it to be. Moreover, his deep skepticism was, in his view, the only means by which he or any other human being could be free of pride, envy, anger, and indignation, which distort the soul, separate us from others, and give rise to folly and human wickedness.
-Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought
The slippery slope.................
Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. . . . Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and - after some hesitation - the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea.
-Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Renaissance
Friday, April 5, 2024
We may be suffering..................
.......................... from a lack of inculcation:
In his sixties, Adams would say that vigilance in civic life had been inculcated in him at an early age. "Let the people keep a watchful eye over the conduct of their rulers," he explained, "for we are told that great men are not all times wise. It would be indeed a wonder if in any age or country they were always honest."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Would have liked the opportunity......
...........to have had a few beers with Samuel Adams:
"By fretting at unfortunate events we double the evil."
"The censure of fools and knaves is applause."
Untroubled by perfectionism, he counseled friends not to overthink the details.
He excelled at friendship, which at its best he termed "thinking aloud together."
Though he bore the same name as his exemplary father, he invested little in bloodlines. When traced far enough back, one bumped up against the inevitable horse thief.
He thought the best of people until he could no longer. He shrugged off their opinions.
As affable in his manner as inflexible in his principals, he was at ease with everyone he met.
When he waxed rhapsodic it was about liberty and the rights of man.
Never in his life would he make a wise financial decision. Poverty was not so disagreeable a companion, he held, as the affluent seemed to believe.
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Concerned.......................
I’m not as concerned about artificial intelligence as I am about common stupidity.
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
coldest...............................
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people'.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for All and None
quotation forensics.....................
Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught, . . .
-Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons in 1952
Monday, April 1, 2024
imagine............................
Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.
pillars.....................
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
-George Washington, from his 1796 Farewell Address letter
blogging..............................
 |
| Auguste Rodin The Walking Man c 1877 bronze |
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
On limitations...............
I do not mean by this that there has been, or can be, any progress in an attempt of the people to exist without a strong and vigorous government. That is the only foundation and the only support of all civilization. But progress has been made by the people relieving themselves of the unwarranted and unnecessary impositions of government. There exists, and must always exist, the righteous authority of the state. That is the sole source of the liberty of the individual, but it does not mean an inquisitive and officious intermeddling by attempted government action in all the affairs of the people. There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns.
-Calvin Coolidge, from this 1922 speech
Bet......................
Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting.
Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws.
Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws.
Our relatively modest strength.
Our long, vulnerable road to adulthood.
Our long, vulnerable road to adulthood.
Our species' success is the story of betting
on understanding over brutality.
on understanding over brutality.
It's the wise, patient bet.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Soft
Sunday, March 31, 2024
What cigars and bourbon are for.........
Getting things right requires triangulating with other people. Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether "metacognition" (thinking about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an "art" because it requires both tact and doggedness. And I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. That is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit.
-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
On perception.............
Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.
Goodness.......................
Human goodness is widely distributed, and I have no respect for religious people who cannot see this. . . . Religion, as I explain it there, is a principled opposition to the will to power. Faith is about the forms of gracious coexistence that abjure the use of power.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
discharged........................
Man enjoyed no greater blessing, he argued, than civil government. It protected him both from his neighbor's self-interest and his own "propensity to superiority." To resist a ruler was treason. Adams rejoiced in the security their sovereign extended to his subjects. It was "the duty of every subject, for conscience's sake, to submit to his authority, while he acted according to the law." Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, "he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Life its ownself.....................
To know the most important things was, for Franklin, to answer two questions (to borrow an expression from John William Ward). Who am I? And how did I get to be me? . . . in his mind the most important truths could be understood only by investigating our most immediate and concrete experiences of life—life as real people live it and not as we might see it through the dark glass of intellectual sophistication.
-Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought
Prayers...................
Prayers to the Holy Spirit are all fundamentally a plea for the Spirit's coming. . . . The Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life.
-Jürgen Moltman, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life
A Man for Our Times......................
Socrates was always suspicious of the obvious, and he can nearly always show that the obvious is untrue, and the truth is very rarely obvious.
-Paul Johnson, Socrates: A Man for Our Times
Saturday, March 30, 2024
How did they build................
.............................all those cathedrals?
Despite the acceleration of technological progress, indeed because of it, one of the few scarcities in the future will be a long attention span. There will be no shortage of amazing materials that can do magic, astounding sources of energy to make anything happen, and great reserves of knowledge and know-how to accomplish our dreams. But the gating factor for actually completing those big dreams may be the distractions that any society feels over the centuries. What your parents and grandparents found important you may find silly, or even embarrassing.
-Kevin Kelly, from here
Financial rules..........................
Holding a credit card balance from month to month is one of the worst financial decisions you can make.
The first rule of personal finance is you pay off your credit card balance every month.
The second rule is don’t forget rule number one.
-Ben Carlson, from here
The greatest trick the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys.
-Packy McCormick, as culled from this list
On fishing in different ponds...........
This country has challenges and the higher education system is near the top of the list. However, one thing that is far from challenged is its vast depth of talented, driven, hopeful, and resourceful young people. The key for businesses looking to hire young talent or investors trying to find the next great company is to seek out and identify these young people and give them the opportunity to shine.
-Ted Lamade, from this post
It is not called Boyle's Guideline...
There’s no such thing as work life balance. There’s simply life. And you spend part of your life at work.
-Seth Godin offers more here
Riddles...............................
And who are we to solve it? All the same, we ourselves form a particle of it, of the society of which we ask, Where is it going, to the devil or to God?
-as Rob Firchau channels Vincent van Gogh
Our friend at Sippican Cottage........
........................makes some observations:
When I returned, I looked around, and realized the world I was born into was completely gone. I’d been watching it sluice down some sort of drain for so long, that I wondered if I was some sort of involuntary antichrist, making each tomorrow worse than today, every day since I was born. The whole 200,000,000- way handshake seems to have been totally replaced with nothing but a Balkan competition to see which sect could pull themselves to the top of a greasy pole with nothing but a Netflix login screen at the top. The competition was desultory, because no one wanted any job but greasing the pole. Climbing is a lot of work.
Sunday, March 24, 2024
Pondering the future...........................
............of the commission-based real estate market.
Ben Carlson asks some good questions. We've been pondering this idea for a while. The current system has been in place my entire career, so please forgive any bias you find here.
We have long believed that real estate agents bring value to the marketplace. Going forward we will find out if the marketplace agrees.
Long overlooked in this discussion is the amount of "free work" real estate agents provide. If you know a real estate agent, ask them how many properties they have shown and offers they have written that don't materialize into a sale. You may be surprised by how often that happens. The current system allows for - accounts for - all of the "free work." Will it be missed if it goes away? Do you believe prospective real estate buyers will be willing to incur costs even if they are unsuccessful in buying?
An enlightened way to look at this commission business is to say that the transaction pays the fee. Not the seller and not the buyer, the Transaction. No meeting of the minds between buyer and seller - no deal and no commission. No successful completion of the buyer's due diligence inspections - no deal and no commission. No successful arrangement of financing - no deal and no commission. The transaction costs typically have been funded on the seller' side of the settlement statement, primarily because it eases the transaction's completion. Reasonable people can disagree on what "fair and reasonable" transaction costs should be. Fees have always been negotiable (you can look through my past files and see the truth in that), but, generally in the marketplace with individual seller and buyers, incentives matter. Just remember - the transaction is paying the fees.
It strikes us that, for all the noise about commissions and who is going to benefit, the true seismic change coming out of the court action and settlement agreements will be the impact on the National Association of Realtors (NAR) itself. As a trade association with over a million and a half members scattered all over the country, NAR has had some success in the political arena over the years. The Realtors Political Action Committee (RPAC) raises significant dollars every year from the Realtor membership. Those dollars go to support politicians and positions considered to be beneficial to NAR's perceived interests. While not monolithic (I stopped giving RPAC money years ago because of their "fight to the death" attitude on mortgage interest deductions), NAR does speak for an awful lot of folks. One outcome from the lawsuits and settlement may be to fracture the association membership, weaken RPAC, and break the back of NAR's perceived political influence. If I was a more cynical person, I might believe that was the end game with this whole thing.
Anyway, this post started out by saying Ben Carlson asks some good questions. It will take some time for the real estate marketplace and industry to find the answers to those questions.
Recalibrating...................................
..............................................success.
Saturday, March 23, 2024
Friday, March 22, 2024
Beware the echo chamber..................
Taken together, these studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
-Tim Harford, from here
Be careful what you wish for......
Most Trump antagonists seem to be laughing and salivating. I suppose they would enjoy seeing the man tortured. It's bizarrely shortsighted. Do they think Trump is uniquely evil and nothing that happens to him will set a precedent?
-from this Althouse post
Happy Birthday...........................
This classic clip, featuring some interesting role reversals, is worth 3:42 minutes of your time.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
a now familiar paradox..............
In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
-Adam Gopnik, from this review
Seems like an early spring this year..........
 |
| Supposed to fall to 20 degrees tonight. Fearing for the magnolia blooms - my favorite blooming tree. |
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| My Sweetie and I just finished covering the peony sprouts. They are very early this year. |
 |
| Too many daffodils to cover. They're on their own |
First world......................................
...........................................problems.
Opening paragraphs................
Clay Hutmacher Jr., twenty-five, stood knee-deep in the Twelve Sleep River, casting for trout with a determined look on his face and an engagement ring in his pocket. He was twelve miles from the town of Saddlestring, on the ranch his father managed and that, he hoped, he would take over some day. . . .
The wonderful thing about fly-fishing, he'd discovered, was that it was all-consuming. The tactics, the gear, reading the water, the choice of flies, keeping his balance on smooth round river rocks—all of that fully occupied his mind and pushed out other concerns.
Fly-fishing was like sex in that way.
-C. J. Box, Three-Inch Teeth: A Joe Pickett Novel
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Sort of interesting...................
-a few excerpts:
Their deepest underlying assumption may be that the tradeoff between doing well and being well is a false choice.
The best teams aren't the ones with the best thinkers. They're the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.
. . . that collective intelligence depends less on people's cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.
The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and will never achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.
If you doubt yourself, shouldn't you doubt your low opinion of yourself?
came naturally...................
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism. Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Reflection..........................
The danger in trying to hide who you are is that you'll succeed, and you'll start to see a stranger in the mirror of other people.
brainwriting....................
To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we're better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise. . . .
Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Believe......................
Some make the world believe that they believe what they do not believe. Others, in greater number, make themselves believe it, being unable to penetrate what it means to believe.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Monday, March 18, 2024
Classic......................
................................Christopher Hitchens:
Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-1990
-1990
I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying. There were a lot of other people born in April, 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them.
-2001
-2001
Of complexities..............
Of the complexities introduced by the "present vast and delicate division of labor," he wrote, "When everybody is working for everybody, everybody is injured by the mischances of everybody."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
seeds.........................
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
-Maria Popova, from here
a summary......................
It is difficult to improve on the summary of the chronicler who delivered up Adam's first years in a single storm cloud of a sentence: "He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
A love of reading often begins at home....
Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it's not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
If.............................
If we held to God by the mediation of a living faith, if we held to God through him and not through ourselves, if we had a divine foothold and foundation, human accidents would not have the power to shake us as they do.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Opening paragraphs.................
As someone who never really had one, maybe I am the least qualified person to defend the importance of family. But as someone with more education than I ever expected to receive, maybe I'm more qualified to say we give education more importance than we should. I am grateful for the miraculous trajectory of my life, but I had to experience upward mobility firsthand and reach the summit of education to understand its limitations. I've come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.
Rob Henderson, from the Preface to his book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
taxing the mega-rich...................
...................to stop "transformational philanthropy"?
It doesn’t matter if you agree with Mr. Bankman-Fried about how to make the world better, whether you support his veganism, his global-warming alarmism or his priorities for spending his ill-gotten gains. History teaches us that the greatest crimes are committed by those who believe they are mankind’s benefactors.
Independent-mindedness...............
....................or, how to think for yourself:
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.
The federal Board of Tea Experts........
....................................who knew?
It's a warning about the stickiness of bad ideas, about an inertia that can limit even the smallest attempts at trimming the state.
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