Sometimes it is easier......................

..........to simply cut-and-paste, than it is to figure out what to excerpt:

 If we exclude misanthropes, most people today can – without excessive simplification – be divided into two distinct camps: the Awestruck and the Awws. The Awestruck are unceasingly amazed at the modern world. They are enormously grateful for the countless amenities and benefits of life in the modern global economy. They are aware that nearly all of our ancestors not only did without the comfort and convenience of the likes of air-conditioning, automobiles, air travel, aspirin, automatic dishwashers, telephony, recorded music, and laptop computers and smartphones connected 24/7/365 by wi-fi to the Web, the Awestruck also realize that most of our ancestors did without access to antibiotics, artificial lighting, indoor plumbing, the ability to bathe daily, and even regular supplies of food.

The Awws, in contrast, are either ignorant of how most of our ancestors lived, or they believe that our ancestors’ experiences are irrelevant for assessing the state of the world today. Unlike the Awestruck, the Awws do not compare the state of the world today to that of the actual past. Instead, the Awws compare the state of the world today to fictions conjured by their imaginations. They compare today’s reality to what they imagine to be a Perfect World. The Awws then notice an undeniable reality: As marvelous as today’s world is, it’s not perfect. It could be marvelouser. Imperfections abound.

Upon noticing these imperfections the Awws, in their dismay, moan “Awww.” No matter how much higher standards of living for nearly everyone in today’s market-oriented economies are, living standards could be even higher. The costs of obtaining, maintaining, and further raising these living standards could be even lower. The ‘distribution’ of the abundance of goods and services could be more equal. And were there fewer disagreeable aesthetics of industrial, commercial society – what with its factories and mines and pipelines and strip malls and light pollution and telemarketers and vulgar websites – persons with finely polished sensibilities would indeed suffer fewer irritations.

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

Fortunately, the Intertunnel never forgets.........

 .......significant wisdom from Sunday, May 3, 2015.

well served........................

 Postmodern times are well served by premodern thinkers, especially when it comes to caring about cosmos and psyche.

-Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Times

Nourishment...............................

  I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. 

-via

On re-teaching old dogs old tricks...................

     The big question that we all face, as we look towards the second half of the year, is whether the pullback in risk capital is temporary, as it was in 2020, or whether it is more long term, as it was after the dot-com bust in 2000 and the market crisis in 2008. If it is the former, there is hope of not just a recovery, but a strong rebound in risky asset prices, and if it is the latter, stocks may stabilize, but the riskiest assets will see depressed prices for much longer. I don't have a crystal ball or any special macro forecasting abilities, but if I had to guess, it would be that it is the latter. Unlike a virus, where a vaccine may provide at least the semblance of a quick cure (real or imagined), inflation, once unleashed, has no quick fix. Moreover, now that inflation has reared its head, neither central banks nor governments can provide the boosts that they were able to in 2020 and may even have to take actions that make things worse, rather than better, for risk capital. Finally, at the risk of sounding callous, I do think that a return of fear and a longer term pullback in risk capital is healthy for markets and the economy, since risk capital providers, spoiled by a decade or more of easy returns, have become lazy and sloppy in their pricing and trading decisions, and have, in the process, skewed capital allocation in the economy. If a long-term slowdown is in the cards, it is almost certain that the investment strategies that delivered high returns in the last decade will no longer work in this new environment, and that old lessons, dismissed as outdated just a few years go, may need to be relearned. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

Success.................................

..................................................................the old-fashioned way:

"Practice frugality. Work hard. Save and invest your money."

Puncture......................

Irreconcilable differences between old and new can be found in something as seemingly trivial as naming conventions.  The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness and formality, to validate the organizations which spoke with the voice of authority:  "Bank of America," "National Broadcasting Corporation,"  "New York Times."  Each of these three names stood for a professional hierarchy which claimed a monopoly of specialized knowledge.  They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress.  Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses.

The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order:  "Yahoo!,"  "Google," "Twitter,"  "Reddit," "Flickr," "Photobucket," "Bitcoin."  Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonable sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company "National Search Engine Corporation" and Mark Zuckerberg never felt tempted by "Social Connections Center of America."  It wasn't the style.

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt of the Public

The good old days.................?

By 1870, opium was more available in the United States than tobacco was in 1970. It was as if the shift toward modernity and a wholly different kind of life for humanity necessitated for most working people some kind of relief — some way of getting out of the train while it was still moving.

-Andrew Sullivan, as taken from this essay

A longish excerpt......................

............from Nick Romeo's read-worthy essay,  Platonically Irrational:  How much did Plato know about behavioural economics and cognitive biases?  Pretty much everything, it turns out.

Intellectual humility and overconfidence can stem from purely cognitive processes, but they are also correctly understood as moral achievements or failings. Someone who always thinks that he is right about everything, however little he knows, is making a moral as well as a mental mistake. Similarly, the cultivation of intellectual humility is, in part, the cultivation of an ethical virtue. Many of the early Socratic dialogues end in uncertainty: the characters are reduced to what in ancient Greek was called aporia, and is often rendered in English as ‘perplexity’, ‘bafflement’, or ‘confusion’. Socrates’ interlocutors search for a satisfying answer to some question only to find that every proposed answer fails to satisfy tests of logical consistency. Characters react in different ways to this process – some become flustered, some threaten violence, some run away, and a few recognise that they have been improved, and express gratitude to Socrates. Their false steps in the arguments dramatise errors in reasoning, but their emotional reactions are the stuff of literature: they reveal hubris and arrogance, modesty and generosity, and the dynamic struggles between these opposed impulses – what the novelist William Faulkner in 1950 called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’.

via

Do you think............................?

"Maybe, just maybe, thirty years of rising through the ranks of the world’s largest oil company and ten years running it taught Rex Tillerson a few skills."

-Walter Russell Mead, taken from here

Willing to hope..........................

     That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.

-Samuel Johnson,  Johnson on Shakespeare:  essays and notes

Old school............................

via

On dogs teaching humans to share.........

via

Teaching...............................

..............................................................the old-fashioned way.

Legacies..............................

"If you want to get rich, you'll need a few decent ideas where you really know what you're doing.  Then you've got to have the courage to stick with them and take the ups and downs.  Not very complicated, and it's very old-fashioned."
-Charlie Munger


cartoon via

Simple, not easy, simple..........................

"If you want to get rich, you'll need a few decent ideas where you really know what you're doing.  Then you've got to have the courage to stick with them and take the ups and downs.  Not very complicated, and it's very old fashioned."
-Charlie Munger

Where can you go to find 50,000...................

........................people without one cell phone amongst them?

Here is a clue:

The good folks who put on the Masters Tournament are generous to a fault.  However, they do like their rules and are serious about enforcing them.  Near to top of the rules list is NO CELL PHONES.  I'm guessing there were no cell phones at Augusta National on Sunday.  Kind of cool actually;  nobody texting, nobody checking their e-mail, nobody taking selfies.  Everybody doing what they came to do, watching great golf.  Life the old fashioned way.

But where's the fun in that...........................?

"Since the financial crisis, it has become commonplace to argue that banks should be run as utilities, not casinos."
-as excerpted from this The Economist leader

Gathering...................................................

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
-Isaac Asimov

cartoon via

Good morning....................................

Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor.......Fun