Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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


Todd Rundgren.....................Utopia (the album)

 

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.

-Jarod K. Anderson

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

ruthless..........................

 








-from this Gaping Void post

radical.........................


ThĂ©odore GĂ©ricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19, oil 
    back story here

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


Mountain..................................Twin Peaks

 

A discourse on the meek..........................

 

...................................and their inheritance.


Classic......................

 ................................Christopher Hitchens:

Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-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

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


Ownership.........................


 It is odd. A large majority of my neighbours now belong to shiny gadgets.

-David Warren, from here


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

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


American Graffiti...........................The Soundtrack

 

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.

via

Aging like a fine wine.............


 ...............five ways to keep your brain happy.


If you could..........................


...................advise your younger self.  (or your older self for that matter)


Saturday, March 16, 2024

effects.........................

I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves . . . It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself.  It can be forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed.

      People with the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite that the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly.  He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

ground rules.................

 Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.

-Michael Wade

Friday, March 15, 2024

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


Ron Wood.......I've Got My Own Album To Do album

 

Been in the..........................

................real estate brokerage business for a long time.  I'm not sure they've thought this through:

The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more. . . .

Although it’s unclear what the future of the housing market will look like, Miller said he expected homebuying to pick up somewhat as costs fall dramatically for homebuyers.

Back story here.

Most pundits seemed to think that low interest rates helped the buyers.  Strikes us that low interest rates actually helped the sellers.   

Most buyers around here seem to think mostly in terms of their monthly mortgage payment.  A monthly payment of $2,000 will amortize a $360,000 mortgage at 3% interest over twenty years.   At 6% interest, that payment will only support a mortgage $280,000.

In a hot and competitive real estate market, which much of the country has experienced lately (mostly because of a shortage of supply of housing), who do you think reaps the reward of the extra $80,000 available mortgage financing that 3% interest provided?  Why do you think housing prices got so high so quickly?  You are kidding yourself if you don't think that part of the housing "affordability" problem was caused by ten years of 3% mortgage money.  When it comes to real estate, low interest rates are inflationary, and that favors sellers.

A similar thing will likely happen with the real estate commission issue.  If commissions fall, in a hot and competitive market, the buyer will not be seeing the benefit.  It will likely go to the seller.  All other things being equal, the buyer working with a broker who will work for a reduced fee, can now afford to offer more.  If the supply problem ever gets fixed and a "buyers' market" emerges, then it might be different.  In the meanwhile, two people can't save the same reduction in fees. (This assumes there will actually be a reduction in fees).  It will benefit either the buyer or the seller.  In a "sellers market," bet on the seller.

Time will tell, but my bet is that pundits thinking changing the long-established commission structure will help buyers, in what is still a "sellers' market," are fooling themselves - and the public.

Prickly..........................




When in doubt
let nature be your guide.

Specifically, cactuses

Be still.
Stay hydrated.
Shelter owls.
Stab your predators.

It's that easy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

image via

The game.........................

  The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.

-Michael Munger,  Is Capitalism Sustainable?

the chess-board.................

 The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.  He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.  He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.  If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

About those plans................

      Adams would proudly claim that he never troubled himself with plans for his future.  All evidence corroborates that approach, one not everyone could afford.

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

certain risks...............

 I may know who and what I am.  I cannot know in advance who or what I could become.  There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

not your friends...........................

 They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life. It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends.

-William Ewart Gladstone, 1871

such a thing as truth..........

 Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."

-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian