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

 

-from this Gaping Void post

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

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

expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Competition..................

 

via

Competition................

       One area where all American steelmakers could maintain absolute, almost religious agreement was on the topic of British steel.  British steelmakers were more efficient, and as a result, their rails were cheaper even than Carnegie's.  As with the iron industry before, the Americans' collective strategy was equally simple: tariffs.  Congress complied.  The tariff on a ton of imported British steel started at $28 per ton.  Given that Carnegie's first-ever order was fulfilled at $68 per ton, the British would have had to sell steel at $40 per ton, with overseas shipping included, to pay the tariff and match the price in the market.  In an era without a personal income tax or corporate income taxes, the federal government relied on duties and tariff generated income for a significant portion of its revenue . . .

      Even Carnegie, with all his competitive, Darwinian pride, granted that tariff protection "has played a great part in the development of manufacturing in the United States." . . . But laissez-faire capitalism it was not.  The invisible hand of Adam Smith's free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy.

-Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

No idea about his prospects..........

..................but I'll root for this attitude:

 “I took the mindset that it was time for us to stop asking for a seat at the table. And we were going to build our own table,” Smith says.

Escape...........................

 Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn't do into the "How to Get Rich" tweetstorm, was very simple: "Escape competition through authenticity."  Basically, when you're competing with people, it's because you're copying them.  It's because you are trying to do the same thing.  But every human being is different.  Don't copy.

-The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Still one of the all-time great movies...

In that way, Meatballs is exactly like life, or at least life at a summer camp. There is no script. There is no structured three-act story with a perfect ending. It’s a hot mess of half-remembered snippets, tales that are likely exaggerated, and a whole lot of stupid antics in-between that go nowhere.

       

via

The beauty of studying history..........

...................comes from realizing the world has always and forever been a glorious mess.   

      The French expansion into the Ohio country put their plans in jeopardy.  Not only did the French reject the right of the British crown to grant lands in Ohio to the Ohio Company or anyone else, but a French presence in Ohio would render the region insecure for Anglo-American settlers.  The French themselves would be hostile; more threateningly they would turn the Indians of the region hostile.  The various tribes there understood the competition between the two European empires, and they played one against the other, to their own benefit.  Part of the benefit consisted of trade goods that made the lives of Indians easier—firearms, steel knives and the like; another part entailed military support in the rivalries of the tribes against one another.  The sum of the interplay of empires and tribes was a welter of intrigues and conflicts on the frontier: British against French, British against France's Indian allies, Britain's Indian allies against the French and the French Indians, Indians against Indians.  There was even competition between Virginians and residents of other British colonies, notably Pennsylvania and New York, who had their own claims to the Ohio country.

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution

On investing competition..........................

       Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition.  You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter.  I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences.  Competition skews people's assessment; as buyer get competitive, the demand for assets inflates prices, often beyond reason.*

-Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle:  Straight Talk From A Business Rebel

*Also known as "the winner's curse"

On trade..........................

The philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism;  that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery.  We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed.  But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the sort.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1844 lecture, The Young American

"The biggest moment of anyone's life"...

more than you ever wanted to know about Rock Paper Scissors may be found here

Ah, humanity.......................

..................................................Nothing wrong with The World today that more things like this couldn't fix:



thanks

Relax.............................

The coolness of history....................

........................or just more fun stuff I neglected to learn in school:

It seemed the bombing would never end.  As World War II raged on, the UK was being pounded by the planes of Hitler's Luftwaffe.  But the UK was developing a secret weapon that had the power to turn the tide:  a new type of radar. ...

     While the UK had cracked the problem of creating the tech, manufacturing it at a large enough scale and fast enough to save their country would be impossible.  Under relentless Nazi bombardment, there just wasn't the capacity to produce thousands upon thousands of microwave radar devices in short order.

     But there was another way.  Radar technology had already benefited from collaboration between the Allied powers;  maybe once again collaboration would save Great Britain. ...

     The Radiation Laboratory at MIT headed up the project.  (The name was deliberately made vague to conceal the purpose of their mission.  It was later given the much cooler nickname of the "Rad Lab.")  Thirty-five hundred people were employed at the lab, including some of the most brilliant minds of that generation.  Nine would later go on to win a Nobel Prize for other work.

     The advancements they made were spectacular.  One of their systems would be used to direct UK antiaircraft fire and was responsible for taking out 85% of the German V-1 bombs, which had been tearing London apart.  Another type of radar was so sensitive it could detect the periscope on Nazi submarines, allowing the Allies to gain the edge in naval warfare.

      But before these tremendous successes would be realized on the battlefield, the Rad Lab faced one enormous problem:  the damn device didn't work.  At least not consistently.  Testing the new radar off the Charles River in Cambridge, they kept experiencing failures.  Again and again, when it seemed they knew the science in and out, when they tracked down every bug, every problem, the radar would utterly fail.  It was inexplicable.  It felt like God did not want them to succeed, like some great power was actively working against them.

     They were right.  But it wasn't God.  It was Harvard.

      Unbeknownst to MIT,  the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University had received millions of dollars from the U. S. government to secretly develop radar jamming technology, which they were testing on the other side of the Charles River. ...

      Luckily, before the MIT researchers had been driven absolutely insane, the presence of the unintentional "enemies" across the Charles River was made known to them, and then a new type of powerful collaboration began:  a healthy rivalry.

      MIT redoubled their efforts to overcome Harvard's jamming technologies and Harvard fought back with better ways of beating MIT's radar.  The resulting progress from the two academic giants was stunning.

      With Harvard's "help,"  MIT's radar became devastating:

             In November 1942, U-boats claimed 117 Allied ships.

             Less than a year later, in the two-month period of September

             to October 1943, only 9 Allied ships were sunk, while a

             total of 25 U-boats were destroyed  by aircraft equipped

             with ASV radars.

      And with MIT's "assistance," Harvard's jamming technology drove the Nazis into a panic:

             So effective was the Allies' jamming system - it reduced

             German anti-aircraft efficiency by 75% - ...

   

       Many now believe that radar was what won the war.

-Eric Barker, as culled from Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

When a "slight edge".....................

...........................................becomes "accumulative advantage," and the Pareto Principle becomes the 1% Rule.   James Clear is on the case:

Mastery is not an accident. The people and organizations that spend their days accumulating small wins and compounding tiny improvements are the ones that experience massive success. Time and time again, the highest achievers are the ones who have the best habits.

Seeking common ground..............

.................................................................wherever you can find it:

In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends—a priest and an imam—laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company’s role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump's immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. "Well, I’ll tell you one way that I don’t think anybody is divided," Bezos replies. "Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I’m serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world."

-as culled from this Fast Company essay on Bezos and Amazon

On good behavior...................

Arnie presents Jack the 1963 Masters Green Jacket

Jack presents Arnie the 1964 Masters Green Jacket

     But believe me when I say that despite the pain of losing major tournaments to each other and the wild swings in fortune that defined our relationship, we had a lot of fun being in the center of all that attention.  And neither of us ever lost sight of what it was all about, sports and competition, not life and death.  That meant that the guy who lost was always able to congratulate the guy who won with all sincerity.  Likewise, the winner, understanding the disappointment the other man was feeling, was able to be humble and kind.
     I can't think of a better way to behave whatever side of the fence you end up on in your daily pursuits.

-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played:  My Stories.  As extracted from the chapter "Jack."

Everything.......................................?

The magic of............................

..............................................................Mr. Market.

y

“The economics of the cannabis industry show us that with 

healthy competition in the market, prices drop, quality rises, 

violence diminishes, and peaceful transactions increase. 

Maybe we should just surrender in the "War on Drugs" and 

declare victory.  Back story here.