Gordian Knots

Via Bronte Capital

Via NYTimes.com
What company derives 96 percent of its revenue from
advertising, has a video platform that is currently negotiating with the
National Basketball Association, a movie studio and various
celebrities, and is developing a subscription service that would be
plug-and-play for publishers and consumers the world over.

Answer: Google.

“You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that, IBM Watson?”

Blade Runner (1982) – Memorable quotes

Link list to all documentary videos
Resource Library: Interviews : Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
Distressed Debt Investing: I’m Ringing the Bell
James Montier Resource Page
Michael Mauboussin Resource Page
BBC News – Audio slideshow: Human Planet

Adversity is valuable not for what it teaches but for what it reveals.

Lunch with the FT: Sean Parker

“Solving specific problems is what drives me.
I am not interested in having a career. I never have been,” he says.
“This in no way resembles a career. I think a career is something your
father brings home in a briefcase every night, looking kind of tired.”

……. “He
wanted to be entrepreneurial but he had a family and he didn’t feel
able to take the risk of putting everything aside. He actually told me,
‘If you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a
family.’ ”

…. “You
have got to be willing to be poor [as an entrepreneur],” he says.
“There was a time when I was living out of a single suitcase. I had a
rule that I wouldn’t stay on one person’s couch for more than two weeks
because I didn’t want to become a bother.”

So
is a billion dollars cool? He ponders the question carefully. “No, it’s
not,” he says. “It’s not cool. I think being a wealthy member of the
establishment is the antithesis of cool. Being a countercultural
revolutionary is cool. So to the extent that you’ve made a billion
dollars, you’ve probably become uncool.”

• Group Think: How to avoid common decision-making traps
• Effects of Groupthink on Tactical Decision-Making: United States Army Command and General Staff College link
• What do you do for a living? Are you a victim of a Career Crisis?
• Jim Grant Sees Risk In Muni Bonds
• Hussman Funds – Misquoting Keynes
• Jim Chanos on China link
• BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto Globe and Mail
• Untangling Skill and Luck – Michael J. Mauboussin
• Chancellor: China has all the characteristics of a great bubble (FT)
• The Code Breaker: Jim Simons (Bloomberg)
• A Graduation Speech Given by C.S. Lewis (”The Inner Ring”)
• Visceral | Science Gallery

Scott Adams in WSJ.com
Imagination is a wonderful thing. I don’t have much control over the big realities, such as the economy, but I’m an expert at programming my own delusions. I make no apology for that. A well-crafted delusion can be a delicious guilty pleasure. And best of all, it’s totally free.

Pascal Bruckner: via The Observer
He does not believe that happiness can be reliably identified, much
less measured. “Wellbeing is the object of statistics,” he says.
“Happiness is not.” But he is not above issuing advice. “You can’t
summon happiness like you summon a dog. We cannot master happiness, it
cannot be the fruit of our decisions. We have to be more humble. Not
because we should praise frailty or humility but because people are very
unhappy when they try hard and fail. We have a lot of power in our
lives but not the power to be happy. Happiness is more like a moment of
grace.”

Bruckner is at pains to emphasise that happiness has more
in common with an accident than a self-conscious choice. Interestingly,
the origin of the word lies in the Old Norse word for chance: happ.
But leaving happiness to chance, warns Bruckner, is not the same as
ignoring it. “It’s said that if you don’t look for happiness, it will
come. In fact, it’s not so easy. If you turn your back on happiness, you
might miss it. It’s a catch-22 and I don’t think there’s any way out,
except perhaps that real happiness doesn’t care about happiness. You can
reach it only indirectly.”

Via Raptitude.com: H/T Simoleon Sense

…….people who typically

• work almost all the time
• absorb several hours of advertising every night, in their own homes
• are tired and unhealthy and vaguely dissatisfied with their lives
• respond to boredom, dissatisfaction, or anxiety only by buying and consuming things
• have disposable income but can’t find a more fulfilling line of work without losing their health insurance
• create health problems for themselves, which can be treated with drugs they can “ask their doctor about”
• own far more items than they use, and believe they don’t have enough
• are easily distracted from the unhealthy state of their lives and their culture by breaking news and celebrity gossip
• perpetually convince themselves it is not the right time to make major lifestyle changes
• happily buy stuff that breaks within a year, and which nobody knows how to fix
• have learned, through the media’s culture of blame-mongering, that
  the key to solving public and private issues is to find the right people
  to hate

Caldwell on Hayek | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty
Bruce Caldwell of Duke University and the General Editor of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Hayek, his life, his ideas, his books, and articles. The conversation covers Hayek’s intellectual encounters with Keynes, Hayek’s role in the socialist calculation debate, Hayek’s key ideas, and a discussion of which of Hayek’s works are most accessible.

Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, Video 4, Video 5