younger....................

 

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
     though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
      somehow or another)

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

-Mary Oliver, To Begin With, The Sweet Grass

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

  

    Fleetwood Mac...........Say You Love Me

 

meaning...................

 

. . . there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life.  The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed.  The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. . . .

     The most important, however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself.  He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.

-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

willingness........................

 

     A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.  The only way we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. . . .

     The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature.  But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. . . . Another characteristic of human nature—perhaps the one that makes us most human—is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

one thing......................

 

To a visitor who described himself as a seeker after Truth the Master said, "If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else."

"I know.  An overwhelming passion for it."

"No.  An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong."

-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

Red rocks.............................

 

More red rocks

Us humans..................

     

      Traditional software is predictable, reliable, and follows a strict set of rules.  When properly build and debugged, software yields the same outcomes every time.  AI, on the other hand, is anything but predictable and reliable.  It can surprise us with novel solutions, forget its own abilities, and hallucinate incorrect answers.  This unpredictability and unreliability can result in a fascinating array of interactions.  I have been startled by the creative solutions AI develops in response to thorny problems, only to be stymied as the AI completely refuses to address the same issue when I ask it again. . . .

     AI doesn't act like software, but it does act like a human being. I am not suggesting that AI systems are sentient like humans, or that they will ever be.  Instead, I'm proposing a pragmatic approach: treat AI as if it were human, because, in many ways, it behaves like one.  This mindset, which echoes my "treat it like a person" principle of AI, can significantly improve your understanding of how and when to use AI in a practical, if not technical, sense.

-Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Hot streak declared...................

........................at The Hammock Papers.

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

 

      Wings......................Silly Love Songs

 

connection and support............

 

We've been saying that human beings are social creatures; in essence this simply means that each of us as individuals cannot provide everything we need for ourselves.  We can't confide in ourselves, romance ourselves, mentor ourselves, or help ourselves move a sofa.  We need others to interact with and to help us, and we flourish when we provide that same connection and support to others.  This process of giving and receiving is the foundation of a meaningful life.  How we feel about our social universe is directly related to the kinds of things we are receiving from and giving to other people.

-Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

seek..................

 

     Spirituality is one of those realities that you have only so long as you seek it; as soon as you think you have it, you've lost it.  In rediscovering this basic spiritual insight, the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous tapped the essence of open-endedness that characterizes a spirituality of imperfection.  Spirituality is boundless, unable to be fenced in:  We do not capture it; it captures us.  As much as we might like to "wrap things up," to lock spirituality in and hold it fast, it will forever escape our grasp.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

Are these numbers correct.......?

 

     Compare this with a closed system, such as healthcare and hospitals.  That industry takes a very different approach to dealing with errors; not surprisingly, it produces vastly inferior results.

     How different?  Syed notes the remarkable contrast between air travel and preventable medical errors:  After heart disease and cancer, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America.  As many as a half-million fatalities in the US, at a cost estimated at $17 billion a year, are due to errors.  Peter Pronovost, a clinician at Johns Hopkins Medical School, wondered how we would respond if two 747 jumbo jets fell out of the sky each day, killing roughly 900 people.  That's how many people die daily from medical mistakes.

     Why is health care so different from aviation?  First, there is little publicly available data and no standardized review process when errors occur.  Whatever self-evaluation takes place is private, sealed, and not readily available for public scrutiny.  Some people believe doctors are infallible saviors, creating a reluctance to admit error.  Insurance costs, litigation, and protecting reputations reduce the industry's desire for public accounting.  In short, healthcare is everything that aviation is not.

-Barry Ritholtz,  How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

Happy Birthday Sweetie................

Paul McCartney and friends.............Birthday

 

A suggestion.......................

 

• In the short term, I would love to see the Feds and sanctuary cities negotiating local agreements to avoid the Minnesota chaos.  The Feds could agree that if the city cooperates on immigrants who have committed crimes on an agreed list, they will not take enforcement actions against others in the city.  In other words, the Feds agree that if the city will hand over their violent and repeat offenders, the Feds will leave the day laborers at the Home Depot alone.  Then if the city still objects, the Feds can publicly proclaim that they only wanted to deport criminals and the city wanted to keep them.  The PR battle they are losing now could go the other way.

-Warren Meyer, from this post, with a P.S.

 about an hour after I hit publish, the Trump Administration began signaling that looks very close to the first two suggestions above.  We shall see, though this Administration tends to stick to a policy position about as long as a 5-year-old who has mainlined 3 Hershey Bars stays on task.

Crack my head  up...........

At least up to a few years ago...........

 

     Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments.  Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive=good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes.  Especially relevant to this book are those heuristics that tell us when to believe or do what we are asked.  Consider, for example, the shortcut rule that goes, "If an expert says so, it must be true."

-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Here is a radical idea...............

 

Can we build a conceptual framework for thinking about the world that is compatible with what we have learned about it from both theories?

     Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful—incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts.  Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms.  In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined,

     Twenty years ago the fog was thick.  Today paths have appeared that have elicited enthusiasm and optimism.  There are more than one of these, so it can't be said that the problem has been resolved.  The multiplicity generates controversy, but the debate is healthy: until the fog has lifted completely, it's good to have criticism and opposing views.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

In such silence and stillness............

 

...the mind wanders wide ... and wonders never cease.

a healthy outlook.............

 

Since failure is inevitable, we would all benefit from learning how to fail better.

     On a trading desk, you are taught to expect to be wrong.  Surprisingly, that attitude is rare elsewhere in finance.  This is a shame because a healthy outlook on failure benefits businesses, governments, and just about everyone.

-Barry Ritholtz,  How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

Teddy, Jr.....................

 

........................as a leader and a hero:

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. did not shape Utah Beach by following instructions perfectly. He did it by understanding something essential about leadership: that sometimes the most dangerous choice is waiting, that responsibility doesn’t always come with permission, and that decisive action—taken at the right moment—can change history. He didn’t start the war from where it was planned. He started it from where it mattered.

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

Elvin Bishop............Fooled Around and Fell in Love

 

a sweet voice...............

 

     I fear a tyrant approaching me with a sweet voice so that he may later rule me with the strength of his arms.

     The life of the nations, my love, is like the life of individuals: a life cheered by Hope and married to Fear, beset by desires and frowned upon by Despair.

-Kahlil Gibran, Thoughts and Meditations

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

      Boz Scaggs...........................Lowdown

 

found.....................

 

The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories, which his disciples listened to with pleasure—and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper.

The Master was unmoved.  To all their objections he would say, "You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and the Truth is a story."

Another time he said, "Do not despise the story.  A lost gold coin is found by means of a penny candle; the deepest truth is found by means of a simple story."

-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

Buy the coffee...................

 

It's the cliche that refuses to die: Personal finance nag Suze Orman warned investors that if they "waste money on coffee, it's like peeing $1 million down the drain.

     I disagree.  If the difference between success and failure is the cost of a cup of coffee, you have much bigger financial problems.  A daily $5 latte does not amount to much in the grand scheme of life. . . .

     Here is what really gets me annoyed: Orman tells her audience that "Your Daily Coffee Habit is Costing You $1 Million," with this calculation:   Let's say you spent around $100 on coffee each month.  If you were to put that $100 into a Roth IRA instead, after 40 years the money would have grown to around $1 million with a 12% rate of return.

     Nope.  This calculation is nonsense, and worse, it is intellectually dishonest.  The actual real numbers are almost 75% less. . . . So, 12% annual returns for 40 years?  That's 50% better than the markets give you.  I literally have $5 billion for anyone who can get my clients fat 12% returns annually for the next 40 years.

-Barry Ritholtz,  How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

stories...............

 

How do we learn the difference between willfulness and willingness, the distinction between magic and miracle?  The answer will come as no surprise: in the practice and process of storylistening and storytelling.  "Story," the novelist John Gardner observed, "details the gap between intentions and results."  Story conveys the reality of human freedom, for although "real," our freedom is limited, and although "limited," our freedom is real.  To live with an awareness of story is to recognize, with philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, that "We are never more than the co-authors of our own stories."

     Every story details a mixture of what Niccolò Machiavelli named necessità, virtù, and fortuna: cause, choice, and chance.  The very combination of the three reveals that we are neither completely controlled nor completely in control.  We can will, in other words, but we must also be willing.  This can be a difficult, even painful lesson to accept, for we tend to want "either-or," especially in matters of being "controlled" or "in control."  Accepting the impossibility of this willful demand—becoming willing to accept the limited freedom that is ours—is one gift of story.  Stories reveal a spirituality that views life not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived. . . .

. . . We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

      

Control.......................

 

focus....................

 

via

Ah, history......................

 

     Raskob—a hero to the business community and a villain to much of the political establishment and public—planned to use the private dinner to set the record straight; he had no plans to resign from his role as chair of the Democratic National Committee, despite his friend Smith's brutal loss to Hoover.  Instead, Raskob was doubling down:  He planned to promise that he would get the party's finances in order and use his own fortune—estimated to be as much as $500 million—to underwrite the party's fight against Hoover.  That was what the dinner was really about; he wanted the Democrats to spend the next four years single-mindedly and relentlessly attacking Hoover with everything they had.

     Raskob saw his role—and his immense wealth—as the country's most vital counterweight to Hoover.  He believed his money could be used as a political weapon: a way to obstruct the president's agenda, weaken his standing, and ensure he would be a one-term leader.  Raskob considered Hoover a sanctimonious bureaucrat whose meddling and moralizing stood in stark contrast to his own bold, unapologetic faith in capitalism and risk.  But it was more than that, too.  This was deeply personal.  Raskob was not a man accustomed to losing, and his friend's defeat stung.  If Raskob had his way, the Democratic Party would become a well-financed engine of opposition, and a Democrat would be in the White House by 1932.

-Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation

Who would have guessed...........

 

Markets generally work, but occasionally they break down.  When they do, they require government intervention to provide the public good of stability.

  This position is widely at variance with the views at either of two extremes: that financial and commodity markets work perfectly in all times and places, or that they always work badly and should be replaced by planning or governmental assignments.  On the contrary, I contend that markets work well on the whole, and can normally be relied upon to decide the allocation of resources and, within limits, the distribution of income, but that occasionally markets will be overwhelmed and need help.  The dilemma, of course, is that if markets know in advance that help is forthcoming under generous dispensations, they break down more frequently and function less effectively.

-Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises

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

Hot Chocolate....................You Sexy Thing

 

Checking in.............................

 

...................................Rudyard Kipling:

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

--------------------------------------

 If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.

--------------------------------------

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

-------------------------------------

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same

--------------------------------------

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

--------------------------------------

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

-------------------------------------

I keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.

------------------------------------

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

------------------------------------

Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

-----------------------------------

Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.

the detailed complexity............

 

     When we say that human behavior is unpredictable, we are right because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves.  Our intense sensation of interior liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images that we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us.  We are the source of amazement in our own eyes.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

keep going.....................

 

It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.

-attributed to Confucius

----------------------------------------

The Master said, The case is like that of someone raising a mound.  If he stops working, the fact that it perhaps needed only one more basketful makes no difference; I stay where I am.  Whereas even if he has not got beyond leveling the ground, but is still at work, the fact that he has tilted one basketful of earth makes no difference.  I go to help him.

-Confucius, Analects, Book 9, Verse 18

on processes..................

 

     The key to focusing more on process is to understand that good outcomes follow good processes.  Without understanding the underlying process, good outcomes could just as likely be due to dumb luck as to skill.

     You should be reminded of this every time you read the disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future results."  What you are actually seeing is an admission of random outcomes.  When past performance is the result of luck, then it provides zero insight into what future results might look like.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

And all shall be well...............

 

If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel . . .

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

-Henry Miller, as lifted from Little Gidding

Fifty years ago (re-issue)....................

 

  Aerosmith................................Dream On

 

not ours..................

 

     The problem with "willing what cannot be willed" is that we step into a territory that is not  ours—we stake the claim to be God.  This attempt to wrest control from the uncontrollable has become the keynote characteristic of our "Age of Addiction."  We try to command those aspects of our lives that cannot be commanded, we try to coerce what cannot be coerced, and in doing so, we ironically destroy the very thing we crave.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

counsel.........................

     My soul preached to me and said, "Do not be delighted because of praise, and do not be distressed because of blame."

     Ere my soul counselled me, I doubted the worth of my work.

     Now I realize that the trees blossom in Spring and bear fruit in Summer without seeking praise; and they drop their leaves in Autumn and become naked in Winter without fearing blame.

Kahlil Gibran, Thoughts and Mediations

 

For the love of peanut butter...........

 

“Probably my natural attraction to the eternal verities.”

Getting some weather.................

 

Among the things I never knew...........

 

If demography is destiny, the Atlantic Slave Trade transformed the destiny of the entire Western Hemisphere.  Between 1500 and 1800, five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World.  Thanks largely to the recent work of British historians, who have created a digital database that provides the most accurate account ever assembled of the African diaspora, we now know much more precisely the scale and size of the Atlantic Slave Trade and where the enslaved Africans ended up.

     Between 1550 and 1860, European vessels embarked with 12.5 million African captives and landed 10.7 million in the New World.*  During the notorious Middle Passage, 1.8 million enslaved Africans died from some combination of disease, malnutrition, mistreatment, and suicide.  Of the 10.7 million survivors, 4.8 million went to South America, 4.7 million went to the Caribbean, 800,000 went to Central America, and 400,000 went to North America.  (An additional 60,000 entered North America indirectly from the British West Indies.)   In effect, only a small percentage of the enslaved Africans, about 4%, were deposited in the future United States.

     As a result, the Southern Hemisphere was destined to become a multiracial society including a population with African origins.  The Northern Hemisphere was destined to become a predominately white society with a substantial African minority.

*Another African diaspora in the other direction was occurring at the same time, even larger than the Atlantic Slave Trade.  Between fourteen and sixteen million Africans were carried east, across the Sahara, over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.  Africa was plundered from the west by Christians and from the east by Muslims.

-Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

The world has always been messy................

 

The aging Sultan Abdülhamid II convened his cabinet in a crisis session on 23 July 1908.  The autocratic monarch faced the greatest domestic threat to his rule in over three decades on the throne.  The Ottoman army in Macedonia—that volatile Balkan region straddling the modern states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia—had risen in rebellion, demanding the restoration of the 1876 constitution and a return to parliamentary rule.  The sultan knew the contents of the constitution better than his opponents.  One of his first measures on ascending the Ottoman throne in 1876 had been to promulgate the constitution as the culmination of four decades of government-led reforms known as the Tanzimat.  In those days he was seen as an enlightened reformer.  But the experience of ruling the Ottoman Empire had hardened Abdülhamid from reformer into absolutist.

-Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

Yep................

 

     The process of buying books can be a bit hit-and-miss.  I've had my share of misses. . . .

     I look at two things: the contents page and the introduction.  The former gives me a sense of the breadth and depth of the book, and from the latter I get a better understanding of the author's motivations for writing the book, as well as their style.  If I find myself nodding along at the introduction, I'll read a couple of pages from the start and skim through a few more in the middle to get the overall vibe.

     Ultimately, I listen to my feelings.  It's the most straight-forward approach.

-Hwang Bo-Reum, Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books