Christian Baaki

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that’s going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures. And I actually tested this out for myself. I read one hunk of Gibbon ‘s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, then I read a part of War and Peace which is a grand historical novel, right, so I figured that’s

“The scarcest resources in any organization are performing people. Since World War II, the U.S. military—and so far no one else—has learned to test its placement decisions. It now thinks through what it expects of senior officers before it puts them into key commands. It then appraises their performance against those expectations. And it constantly

It is the ability to fabricate hardware, using the technologies of the materials and chemical sciences, that allows the creation of all society’s magical and mundane services, from e-commerce, video conferencing, and clean water, to pharmaceuticals, electric power, ride-sharing, and vacations. There are no services without manufactured products.

By keeping long-term interest rates deliberately low, the Fed in effect subsidized government deficit spending by keeping the cost of borrowing artificially low. Only now as the Fed has had to raise interest rates to counter inflation have the costs to the federal fisc become more apparent.

He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.

“When we speak of someone as well-read, we should have this in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.”

What are the best original sources that everyone else quotes? Find that book and aim to know it.

Although the West’s combination of markets plus science/technology does generate learning (companies die, startups replace them etc), our political institutions show little-to-no sign of learning in how they deal with things like state competition and war. Patterns of failure recur reliably hence books like Thucydides and Sun Tzu remain cutting edg