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

Roxy Music............................the Siren album

 

Data centers...................

 

Data centers are electricity hogs, substantial water users, take up very large tracts of land on which they build very large buildings, and they offer very few (non-construction) jobs. They also pay a premium for sites they want, forcing land values up.  Western Licking County is already home to data centers for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more. Micro Soft just purchased two large tracts of land in central Licking County to build two more of them.  They paid a lot.  A mixed blessing.  As long as AI continues is growth pattern, we will undoubtedly see more in our future.  We don't have to like it, though.

chart from

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

 

via

Lies, damn lies, and statistics...........

 

Data can be biased: There is a widely held belief that data is objective, at least if it takes numerical form. In the hands of analysts who are biased or have agendas, data can be molded to fit pre-conceptions. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

 

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

Supertramp........Crisis? What Crisis? album

 

One understanding..................................

 

..............................of Trump's election victory:

With The Great Clarification of what was really going on with lawfare, back-channel understandings between Big Tech and Big Govt, and questionable conduct by the FBI and the CIA, fear of him was replaced by fear of them.

The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

Baby boomers aging...........................?

 

via

Tanmay Vora...............................

 

............................goes with the flow.

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

..................................with Joseph Schumpeter:

 We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise.

The way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them.

Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.

History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.

 . . .the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Every piece of business strategy must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.

I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

Uh-oh............................

 

.............time for remedial breathing lessons:

Your nose is literally built for breathing. It’s like that top-of-the-line air purifier but you’re over here using your mouth like it’s some open sewer grate. 

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

              The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album

 

A few more minds........................

............to follow in no particular order: 

Emerson.  Feynman.  Aurelius. Thoreau.  Frost.  Mencken.   Blake.  Munger.  Scruton.  Frankl.  Durant.  Larson.  Watterson.  Hawkins.  Russell.  Spinoza.  King.  Firchau.  Harden.  Wade.

Adulting.....................................

 

via

Proposing a new holiday...................................

 

.........................................Silent Letter Day!

Newsweek deliveres the opinion that..............

 

........America is getting the President we deserve.

You can read the essay yourself if you wish.  I will tell you that the following sentence made me stop and say, "What?":

When approximately half of adults in the U.S. lack literary proficiency, is it any surprise we elect leaders who speak in soundbites rather than solutions?

In 2025 almost half (actually, if you follow the link the number used is 54%) of the adults in the United States "lack literary proficiency"?   Can that possibly be true?

via

Speaking of sobriety...............

 If you have a bad habit, replace it with a good habit. Do not try to suppress it entirely. This astute observation echoes a point made by Aristotle himself, more than two millennia ago. It was valid then; it is valid now.

-Stuart Schneiderman, from this post

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

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.....Wake Up Everybody

    

Checking in with.............................

 

.............................James Clear:

Writing is the superpower of humankind. It is our truest form of magic.

Writing allows you to conjure up something of value where nothing previously existed. It costs little for you to write down the lessons of your life and yet those few minutes spent writing can be life-altering for the right reader. As I once saw it put: "there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words."

. . . The world is richer because we write and nobody is made poorer in the process.

trade-offs............................

 

Politics and economics are not just different.  They are antagonistic.

     The basic premise of economics is scarcity.  There is never enough to satisfy everybody.  That means there is no free lunch, no "solutions" but only trade-offs.

     Politics is full of "solutions."  There are free lunches for every voting bloc.  The game in politics is to do a little good, right under your nose, and ignore the harm created elsewhere.

-Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?: and other essays

play.......................

 

. . . if you can play with the horizon of the future, you are indeed doing well.

-Jordan B. Peterson

Tyler Cowen.....................

 

.........visits with Jonathan GPT Swift:

COWEN: If I try to boil your different works — from Gulliver’s Travels to Modest Proposal to the political and coinage writings — down to a common theme, I would say it is this: “Moral and intellectual progress is extremely difficult and is not to be taken for granted.” What would you say to that?

SWIFT: My dear reader, your assessment is perceptive, capturing a common thread that weaves through my diverse body of work. Indeed, I endeavored to convey that moral and intellectual progress is a most arduous endeavor, one that requires constant vigilance and reflection.

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

Allen Toussaint......................Southern Nights

 

Thanks, but I will stick with real estate......

 

Ben Carlson updates his market performance chart:

A demand..................................

 

.........................................worth making.

Chris highlights the problem with this quote attributed to C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

listen.................................

 Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.

-Carl Sandburg