Tuesday, January 10, 2023
In the background..................................
Monday, January 9, 2023
a fingertip.........................
The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it's the desire to learn that is scarce.
Of course they do...................
Men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry.
-Walter Bagehot from this +/- 1859 essay
Sunday, January 8, 2023
certain affinities......................
Flawed or not, Burr shared certain affinities with Jackson. Both speculated in land, engaged in duels, and championed the interests of a growing West. Importantly, they also resided outside of the prevailing American power structure. Neither, in other words, were Virginians. Jackson's refusal to join his congressional colleagues and laud Washington is on par with Burr's cutting insistence that the great general lacked completely "independence of character" and managed to somehow become a national hero "without talent." Men on the make, they would have to make their own opportunities.
-David S. Brown, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson
In the background.........................
It is early in the game, but "Unprecedented" has jumped to an enormous lead to be 2023's "Word of the Year".........
We live in unprecedented times. The recession in 2020 was not so much a recession as it was a lockdown. Using “normal words” to describe the economy in the last 3 years, we believe, does not make sense.
Whither the market in 2023.......?
The only Wall Street strategist-type forecast I’m willing to make is this: The stock market will have a correction in 2023.
I’m not exactly going out on a limb here for one simple reason — the stock market has a correction every year.
My work shows over the past 100 years or so just 5% of all trading days experience an all-time high for the U.S. stock market. Invert that data and that means 95% of the time as a stock market investor is spent in a state of drawdown from an all-time high.
The stock market cannot go up every single day. In fact, historically the stock market is only up on roughly 55% of all days that it’s open and down on the other 45% of days.
A simple equation......................
Life Fulfillment = Time + Health + Money.
Apply this equation to creating meaningful experiences. Rinse and repeat.
Money isn’t last in the formula by accident. A billion dollars isn’t enough to overcome poor health and to starve yourself of meaningful experiences. Conversely, a modest sum of money goes a long way, combined with optimal health and strong social connections.
Many investors ignore this logic at their peril. Obsessing over money and letting it supersede time and health is the path to anxiety and disappointment, no matter how “rich” a person is perceived.
Putting 2022 to good use...............
..................................20 lessons learned.
4. If you have a problem with them, and them, and them, and them, the problem is probably you.
5. Failure is the tuition you pay for success.
10. Task yourself with a huge must-do project that has a deadline far out enough that you can safely procrastinate on it for a day or two. Watch your productivity on every other possible thing go way up to avoid that one.
17. One day, I hope not to measure my days in minutes or hours, but in miles walked and pages read.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
Traveling to Mars..................
...............or not? Here's a fun-to-read essay suggesting it would be folly to send live humans to explore the red planet.
"When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion."
Maybe some good will come..................
................from all the drama over the Speakership:
According to ZeroHedge, here is a list of concessions McCarthy had to make to secure the votes of some Representatives. This one caught my eye:
4. Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.
We will see.
Opening paragraphs..................
I know I'm in trouble on the run down towards Shuttlecock, but I am laughing—I don't care.
I am once again riding in a Grand National, the first time in nearly eight years, but this isn't the four-and-a-half-mile steeplechase over the thirty fences of Aintree Racecourse. This Grand National is a different type of race altogether—a never-jangling, teeth-rattling, buttock-clenching, roller-coaster ride sown the three-quarter-mile long ice chute—the Cresta Run in the Swiss town of St. Moritz.
-Felix Francis, Iced: A Dick Francis Novel
Fifty years ago.............................
intuit.........................
All species struggle to survive and strive to reproduce. A chance mutation about 200,000 years ago made early Homo sapiens more sensitive to social information. This mutation increased the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain's frontal lobe, enabling out ancestors to not only understand what others were doing cognitively, but also experience the emotions of others. This helped early humans survive by enabling them to draw on social resources more effectively.
Over time the mutation spread. Rather than being limited to living in small bands of kin-based groups as our genus had for millions of years, Homo sapiens could live in increasingly larger and more complex societies because they could intuit others' intentions. The most basic social information is the intention to help or harm. As culture flourished, societies developed norms in which helpers were embraced and the selfish and violent were ostracized. . . .
We truly became social creatures when the brain network that oxytocin activates allowed us to determine who to trust. Knowing when to trust strangers led to large-scale societies. In these communities, an individual's survival depended on many others. Cooperation among nonkin provided social insurance against a bad crop or an unsuccessful hunt. Communities began to function like superorganisms in which each segment nourished the other parts.
Paul J. Zak, Immersion: The Science of The Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness
If only...............................
Walter Bagehot's father showed more confidence in his son that Walter did in himself. In preparation for joining the family bank, the refugee from the law lived in Langport to make a study of double-entry bookkeeping. He admitted that the theory of accounting "is agreeable and pretty, but the practice perhaps as horrible as anything ever was." The student who had kept up with the pyrotechnical intellect of Augustus De Morgan at University College could not seem to add or subtract. "If only," Bagehot playfully moaned to a school friend, "my relations would admit that sums are matters opinion."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
Escape...........................
Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn't do into the "How to Get Rich" tweetstorm, was very simple: "Escape competition through authenticity." Basically, when you're competing with people, it's because you're copying them. It's because you are trying to do the same thing. But every human being is different. Don't copy.
A realist.................
In dealing with the world, Washington was an utter realist. He always sought, as he put it in 1775, at the outset of the war against Britain, to "make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish." . . .
If any single person was responsible for establishing the young Republic on a firm footing, it was Washington. He was nearly as much of an aristocrat as the United States ever produced, in his acceptance of social hierarchy and in his belief that some were born to command and most to obey. Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest."
- Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different
Friday, January 6, 2023
On appropriateness..................
It is a kind of mockery and insult to praise a man's worth for qualities unbecoming his rank, though they be otherwise laudable, and for qualities also which ought not to be his principal ones; as if you praised a king for being a good painter, or a good architect . . .
The companions of Demosthenes in the embassy to Philip praised that prince as being handsome, eloquent, and a good drinker. Demosthenes said that those were praises more appropriate to a woman, a lawyer, and a sponge, than a king.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 40
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