Little rules about big things
Morgan Housel:
Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.
His new book on personal finance isn’t too bad, by the way.
When the Money’s Just Too Damn Good
Nat Eliason:
But if I get through that part, sometime around mile three or four, it clicks. I know this is how the mental cycle of running plays out, but I have to endure it every time. Knowing what’s coming helps me get through the suck though. It just took a lot of runs to realize.
How San Francisco Became a Failed City
Living in a failing city does weird things to you.
Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
Our misguided obsession with Twitter
Cal Newport:
A message originally meant for your direct followers could now, under the right conditions, disseminate exponentially through the network. These viral dynamics were further turbocharged when Twitter subsequently moved away from sorting time lines in strict reverse chronological order, and began deploying algorithms that prioritized engagement, which can lead to popular tweets spreading faster.
Zero-Sum Environments
Banham writes: “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”