There is some truth in this..................

 

Most of us are making it up as we go, moving the goalposts continually and never settling on a specific definition of money or happiness.

-Ben Carlson, as extracted from here

according to history, anyway...............

 

Rebellion is treason until successful . . .

-Salmon P. Chase

lazy jugglers.......................

 

That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results.

-Seth Godin, from here

The 20-5-3 rule.............................

 

......for experiencing the healing power of nature.

To buy or not to buy.....................?

 Offering advice on the home buying process is even harder than offering investment advice without more context. Investing is personal but your living situation has even more idiosyncratic risks involved.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

For a wealth management kind of guy he has a pretty good feel for real estate.   Will admit to some surprise at seeing his chart of the gross profit margins for the largest production builders.  If we knew they were making that much money we would have charged them more for the building lots we sold them.

On winning and losing................

 Some days I feel like I have a really strong grasp of the situation and somedays everything seems upside-down. And again, I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. I have global strategists and chief economists from Fidelity, JPMorgan, Vanguard, BlackRock, etc literally on speed dial. It doesn’t matter. If anything, the proximity to all this intel is probably even worse for most people because of how delusional we can become when we think we know something.

-Josh Brown, from here

Frugal versus..............................

 ..........................................independent.

I tried that strategy......................

..........................but got different results:

Late in life, Churchill would claim that "I gained a lot by not overworking my brain when I was young."  Typically, he tried to make a plus out of a minus, arguing in 1921 that "it is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. . . . Young people should be careful in reading, as old people in eating their food.  They should not eat too much.  They should chew it well." 

-Thomas E. Ricks:  Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Despite all the evidence.....................

......................I still choose to be optimistic.

The whole country is becoming the DMV.

-from this manifesto of pessimism

via

lustre.................................

 . . . the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue, for unhappily, the road which leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in very opposite directions.  But the ambitious man flatters himself that, in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. . . . But, though they should be so lucky as to attain that wished-for greatness, they are always most miserably disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy it in.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

14 ways.............................

 ..............................to start an argument in a bar:

4) Today’s super-hopped IPAs are close to undrinkable.

7) An important moment in civilizational collapse was when they replaced live action Saturday morning kids’ shows (The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Fury, The Cisco Kid) with cartoons.

8) Today we listen to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, not to mention the Beatles, but fifty years from now no one will listen to today’s rap.

12) If we all went back to dressing like people did in the 1940s and 50s the world would be a better place.

13) Notwithstanding a few worthy practitioners like Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism was basically a mistake.

-as extracted from here

Habits.................

 If two people have the same goal, you know nothing about the similarity of their results. But if two people have the same daily habits, you can infer quite a bit about the similarity of their results. Your results are largely a byproduct of your habits.

-James Clear

On our active imaginations...........

 The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

-Friedrich August von Hayek

Actually, he did..........................

 

Ah, the fine art of reasoning..............

A breath of fresh air...........................?

 

Shadows................................

       The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.

       We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.  We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is.  In trying to get this alignment, we lose sight of the fact that for most decisions, there are lots of ways things could turn out.

       Experience is supposed to by our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.  Doing so distorts our ability to use those experiences to figure out which decisions were good and which were bad.

Annie Duke, How To Decide:  Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

A different perspective...............................

 ..........................................................In praise of "bubbles."

Opening paragraphs........................

 His name was Dave Farkus, and he'd recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls.  So far, it hadn't worked out very well.

-C. J. Box, Force of Nature

This explains a lot...........................

 Most important challenges are inevitably judgements which reflect an interpretation of a particular situation.  Different individuals and groups will make different assessments and arrive at different decisions, and often there will be no objectively right answer, either before of after the event.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers