Not this year apparently.........

 Bing Crosby & Frank Sinatra........White Christmas

 

this time of year...................................

The Beach Boys...................Little Saint Nick

 

To buy or not to buy.....................?

 Offering advice on the home buying process is even harder than offering investment advice without more context. Investing is personal but your living situation has even more idiosyncratic risks involved.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

For a wealth management kind of guy he has a pretty good feel for real estate.   Will admit to some surprise at seeing his chart of the gross profit margins for the largest production builders.  If we knew they were making that much money we would have charged them more for the building lots we sold them.

We would all be......................

 .....................in a much better way if we all took this to heart:

And I can still remember what he said to my graduate school class in summarizing this point: “I have been an economist long enough to recognize that ‘I don’t know’ is an intellectually respectable answer.”

-from this Gary Galles essay

via

Strive for.....................................

 ............................................quirky.

Keep..................................

 .......................................rolling.

it's a process...............

We're often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice.  But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn't to suffer through the daily grind.  It's to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.  It is not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play. . . .

 Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion.  They're usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion.  Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Hope for our political future.........?

 Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia.  It's the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever

a path....................

 Relaxing is not a waste of time—it's an investment in well-being. Breaks are not a distraction—they're a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas.  Play is not a frivolous activity—it's a source of joy and a path to mastery.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

I'd pay to watch this....................

 Have said this before but all the attention is currently on college football and their situation but the real changes to college sports will more greatly affect college basketball. Imagine how places with great post grad programs will do when they can award unlimited NIL and unlimited eligibility. How would you like to play a Harvard or Stanford in March Madness when their starting 5's are 24-years old with 5-years of experience each? One and done superior talent will be at a great disadvantage.

-Chris Lynch, from here

On winning and losing................

 Some days I feel like I have a really strong grasp of the situation and somedays everything seems upside-down. And again, I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. I have global strategists and chief economists from Fidelity, JPMorgan, Vanguard, BlackRock, etc literally on speed dial. It doesn’t matter. If anything, the proximity to all this intel is probably even worse for most people because of how delusional we can become when we think we know something.

-Josh Brown, from here

Good guys/Bad guys.........................

 ......Maybe two competing truths can be true at once. 

Ouch........................

more fun here 

guerilla warfare............................?

 

Sounds of the Season............................

Mannheim Steamroller..............1984 Christmas Album

Strange and strong.......................

 Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.

-culled from this Paul Graham essay

I still say they are just guessing............

 Explanation: Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. Light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

-via the APOD site

together.........................

In the journey to the light,
the dark moments
should not threaten.
Belief
requires
that you hold steady.
Bend, if you will,
with the wind.
The tree is your teacher,
roots at once
more firm
from experience
in the soil
made fragile.

Your gentle dew will come
and a stirring
of power
to go on
towards the space
of sharing.

In the misery of the I,
in rage,
it is easy to cry out
against all others
but to weaken
is to die
in the misery of knowing
the journey abandoned
towards the sharing
of all human hope
and cries
is the loss
of all we know
of the divine
reclaimed
for our shared
humanity.
Hold firm.
Take care.
Come home
together.

-Michael D. Higgins,  Take Care

It's hard to get enough of........................

................................Charlie Munger. 

If you have to have enemies....................

 ..................................Doomers are my sworn enemies.