The Licking County Courthouse is all dressed up for the holiday.
Many
situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you
start walking.
You don't
need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have
the courage to get started.
-James Clear, from this edition
Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.
Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. "We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp," he writes. "Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions."
Virtue is something we do.
It's something we choose.
Not once, for Hercules's crossroads was not a singular event. It's a daily challenge, one we face not once but constantly, repeatedly. Will we be selfish or selfless? Brave or afraid? Strong or weak? Wise or stupid? Will we cultivate a good habit or a bad one? Courage or cowardice? The bliss of ignorance or the challenge of a new idea?
Stay the same . . . or grow?
The easy way or the right way?
-Ryan Holiday, Wisdom Takes Work
A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power—a power not available to opponents. Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his or her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny. Freedom can only be guaranteed in a political system where the constitution sovereign is God himself, where he has sought and obtained the free consent of the governed, and where he has bound himself to respect human freedom.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
So whether you're in retail, finance, real estate, education, health care, computer services, transportation, or communications, you have an incredible opportunity to be just as intentional and creative—as unreasonable—about pursuing hospitality as you are about every other aspect of your business. Because whether a company has made the choice to put their team and their customers at the center of every decision will be what separates the great ones from the pack.
Unfortunately, these skills have never been less valued than they are in our current hyperrational, hyperefficient work culture. We are in the middle of a digital transformation. That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our live, but too many companies have left the human behind. They've been so focused on products, they've forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don't think for a second that it doesn't matter. In fact, it matters more.
The answer is simple, if not easy: create a culture of hospitality. Which means addressing questions I've spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good—that is the problem of political philosophy.
-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
Perhaps the largest barrier to housing availability and affordability in places like California are permitting rules, land use restrictions, and construction codes that make it absurdly expensive, or even outright impossible, to construct new single or multi-family housing. Part of this is a conspiracy of current homeowners to protect and increase the value of their property -- after all, new home construction inevitably reduces their property value (or future escalation) by adding competing inventory and/or by creating congestion and loss of property-value-enhancing open space. Another part of this is "everything bagel liberalism" where every program has to achieve every Leftish goal -- eg we want new housing but it has to have solar and appliances with a minimum SEER and use recycled materials and have a certain number of units set aside for protected groups and create a conservation easement on part of the land, etc etc -- until even units that can get permitted are too expensive for all but the very wealthy.
-Warren Meyer, from this post
It doesn’t matter if you are trying to pick a new skill, or get fit. Discipline is the secret sauce. Do it long enough and it becomes a part of who you are. Then rewards compound. Every seed of talent, when watered with consistent input grows to bear multiple fruits.
-Tanmay Vora, from here
We live in a world of unintended consequences.
-Michael Wade, as he posts on technology and AI
P. S. Check his recommended reading list at the end
...........takes a look at the housing affordability crisis:
It won’t make you feel any better as a young person in the U.S. to know that it’s even harder for people to afford homes in other countries around the globe.
But these numbers help put things into perspective that things can always get worse.
If the government doesn’t make this a priority the housing affordability crisis likely will get worse in the coming years.
Editor's Note: The only thing the government can do to relieve the housing affordability crisis is to remove many of the regulatory barriers to new development. At the end of the day, supply versus demand still rules. If it were easier to build new housing, more housing would be built. Once supply exceeds demand, or even matches it, prices will moderate. Any attempt to subsidize home buyers or tenants, will only cause prices to keep increasing. Trust me on this.
My Sweetie has been co-chair of the Granville Turkey Trot for a while now. The 5k run/trot/walk/waddle event, held Thanksgiving mornings, draws a good crowd. Despite temperatures hovering around freezing, over 2,000 friendly folk participated this morning. This is the twentieth year for the event; it has become a family tradition. The Granville Turkey Trot is also a fund-raiser. All of the money goes to the Food Pantry Network of Licking County. Last year the committee wrote them a check for around $130,000. My Sweetie is hoping they top that this year.
If the nation is generous, governments take it upon themselves to cure all the ills of humanity. They will revive commerce, they say; they will bring prosperity to agriculture, develop factories, encourage arts and letters, abolish poverty, etc., etc. All that is needed is to create some new government functions and pay for some new functionaries.
-Frédéric Bastiat, from his Economic Sophisms, Second Series (1848)
It is often said that history provides us with no action replays. It is not given to controlled experiments. We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right. In fact, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
-Thomas Paine, as culled from his pamphlet, Common Sense
He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.
-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy. Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .
Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system. The choice is between capitalism and chaos. A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
"The end of being is to know; and if you say the end of knowledge is action—why yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge." Self-knowledge and self-cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goals of life itself.
-Robert D Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when they are young nor weary in the search when they have grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more.
-Epicurus, as cut-and-pasted from this letter
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