Brian
@bshih
Brian
Overcoming Our Politics of War – David D. Corey
lawliberty.org
Anomie
strangeloopcanon.com
A good piece on why big tech is the new TINA, and the casino is alive and well.
The Anglosphere sucks at building housing
China’s new-build solar additions in the last six months are more than the US has installed in total: China Flow > US stock. Germany was once the global champion of solar. China’s new additions in six months are two times Germany’s installed capacity.
Chartbook 409 Beyond the "Marshall Plan": China's solar boom as world-changing industrial policy.
So thank you, Uncle Sam. Someday your nieces and nephews at Berkshire hope to send you even larger payments than we did in 2024. Spend it wisely. Take care of the many who, for no fault of their own, get the short straws in life. They deserve better. And never forget that we need you to maintain a stable currency and that result requires both... See more
Warren E. Buffett • Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Annual Report 2024
“The best thing you can do is whatever nobody else is doing. And the way to find that is to notice what about yourself is weird.”
Justin Gary • Derek Sivers — Embracing Simplicity, Owning Your Weirdness, and Designing a Life with Intent (#86)
World as machine : In keeping with theme of this newsletter, we’re adopting a mechanistic, engineering perspective. We’re trying to do our reading with an eye to reverse engineering how the world works (and how it came to work that way) in a machinic rather than humanist idiom. So we deliberately go looking for machine metaphors, decenterings of... See more
The Modernity Machine II
“Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The... See more
The Interesting Times: How to Do What You Love
I think I mostly agree except that sometimes you sort of don’t enjoy doing things early on because they’re new and hard. It’s easy to enjoy doing stuff that can seem like “producing” (e.g., endlessly doing research or studying) but not actually being productive. Many true forms of creative production are Type 2 fun, which is not necessarily enjoyable in the moment.
But look a little bit more closely. Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and all the other many groups have something in common: they all operate out of places with exceptionally weak and fragile states (and, if you want to get all lib about it, fractured and hopeless societies). How could it be otherwise? Governments don’t like a bunch of other wannabe... See more
REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr
I guess this is because we love the American Revolution founding story of being rebels still…