Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: February 2020 Page 2 of 3

The Oligarch Stage of the American Disease: Bloomberg Edition

By

On February 19, 2020

Comments

Michael Bloomberg

So, Michael Bloomberg has spent $300 million, and, by some polling, is now tied for second place in the Democratic primaries with Joe Biden, whose numbers are collapsing.

Bloomberg is worth about $63 billion.

He entered the race to defeat Sanders. He considered entering the race in 2016 until it became clear that Clinton would be the nominee.

This makes perfect sense, because Sanders tax plan will cost him billions. He can spend ten times as much as he has, and it will still be a good investment.

The thing about Trump was always that he was a symptom of a disease. It’s hard to say exactly when the disease started, but serious symptoms started showing up after the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. Wage increase rates collapsed, stock markets and other asset prices rose much faster than inflation, regulations were gutted, people were thrown in jail at a ferocious rate, and unions were smashed.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Inequality took off, and over time this created “multibillionaires.” They used their money to buy politicians, and, through those politicians, they bought policy. They slashed tax rates on corporations, rich people and their estates, and so on to the bone. They increased subsidies for the rich, while they cut subsidies for the poor and middle class, in relative terms.

The Federal Reserve (all of whose governors are political appointees), acted aggressively to keep wage increases at or under inflation, and targeted inflation rather than job growth. Good working class and many middle class jobs were off-shored and outsourced. Some of these processes had started before Reagan, such as offshoring and cutting top marginal tax rates (JFK foolishly did so, but then he was the son of an oligarch), but they went into overdrive after 1980.

From ’33 to ’68, the general trend was for the percentage of income controlled by the wealthy to decrease relative to the percentage controlled by everyone else. In 1968, that reversed, but 1980 is when it was locked in.

Money is, of course, power. Anyone who denies this is tediously stupid, given that almost all of us have spent most of our lives doing shit we wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to to get money. (Getting other people to do shit they don’t want to do but that you do want them to do is the very definition of power.)

So, the oligarchs, aided by the huge concentration of companies into oligopolies, have come to own or control vast amounts of wealth. They passed a law that defined money as free speech, and now that the political class has proven incapable of handling a left-wing populist, an oligarch is stepping in directly, because his class’s lackeys, like Biden and Buttigieg (and indeed most of the field), are incompetent.

Bloomberg is an oligarch. He’s racist, sexist, and arrogant. He had New York’s laws changed so he could have a third term. He is competent and ruthless. In most respects, he is far more dangerous than Trump–even though he is for some things the left likes, like birth and gun control. Trump is good at demagoguery, but he isn’t a competent executive.

Bloomberg IS a competent executive. As he joked when asked about having two billionaires in the election, “Who’s the other one?”

(He also has massive interests in China and has done their bidding in the past, a fact the hysterical Russia-Gaters might note.)

My guess is that Bloomberg can’t win except through a brokered convention. The plan may be to deny Sanders an outright majority, then combine against him. Doing so will break the Democratic party. Remember that the Clintons still have the most power over the Democratic establishment, and Hilary hates Sanders with a vindictive passion, while she is on good terms with Bloomberg. Obama, who also still has power and influence, seems more ambivalent, but he’s never liked the left. On the other hand, reports are that he’s dispassionate and recognizes that denying the vote leader the nomination will damage the party.

If Bloomberg does get the fix in, who will win in a Bloomberg/Trump match? I don’t know, but while Bloomberg is more competent as an executive, my feeling is that Trump’s unique strength as a demagogue will be the deciding factor in outmatching Bloomberg. The question then becomes whether Bloomberg’s money and organizational abilities can outweigh that.

Trump has increasingly been acting against the rule of law. He always was, starting with emoluments violations, but now that he was impeached and not convicted, he feels immune to Congress’s censure.

Trump also HAS TO WIN. If he loses, he will be destroyed by his enemies in New York, in various criminal investigations. They will take him down and destroy him. He understands this.

So, it’s oligarch vs. left-wing populist to see who gets to take on the minor oligarch, criminal, and current president Donald Trump, who knows that a loss means the end of his good life and the destruction of the minor empire he has built.

The only possible good outcome for most Americans is a Sanders win. No other path leads anywhere decent.

This is likely be the nastiest election cycle since the Democrats deliberately sabotaged McGovern.

For approximately the same reasons.

It’ll be horrific, and the outcome will control whether many people live, die, or have good or terrible lives. I suggest getting some hot dogs. If Rome is going to burn, you may as well roast wieners.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Groups Only a Fool Trusts

By

On February 18, 2020

Comments

Economists: The vast majority missed the housing bubble.

Intelligence Agencies: Remember Iraq? Part of the job description is lying.

Any Army’s PR: Enough said.

Life Insurance Agents: I worked back office dealing with agents. About ten percent of them were looking after their clients first.

Politicians: Yes, obviously.

Stock Brokers: As the book said, “Where are the client’s yachts?”

Media, in general: Most of them are owned by a few conglomerates. They do what’s in the interests of those big conglomerates or their job leaves. And remember the NYT and Iraq.

Private equity or hedge funders, any senior executive in any large bank: They were all in on the fraud leading up to the financial crisis, and yes, they would do it again.

Any senior executive in any large firm: They didn’t get there by being good people. Good people don’t become Senior VPs.

Central Bankers: They either missed the housing and financial bubble or didn’t care, then they bailed out the rich and fucked over the little people. No one will ever be hired for those jobs who wouldn’t do it again, and again, and again.

Etc.

(This seems like an important piece, so back to the top for those who haven’t read it or have forgotten it. Originally published December 29, 2016.)

My friend Charles Green, who co-wrote the book, The Trusted Adviser, loved to say “I trust my dog with my life, but not my lunch.”

Who you can trust depends on what you are trusting them with, and who you are. Charles can trust his dog with his life; I can’t trust his dog with my life.

Central bankers are the dogs of the rich. The rich can trust bankers to save their lives, no one else can. Perhaps if you were to fall in front of one of them and injure yourself, some of them would call an ambulance for you. You can’t trust them not take away your house, however, or pursue policies that crush your wages and make jobs scarce.

The point here is that just because someone is good in one part of their life, doesn’t mean they’re good in another part of their life. I learned this young: My father was a bastard to his family, but was respected by most of his employees for his loyalty to them.

People are not of a piece, and you need to understand what their jobs are to understand what they can be trusted with.

A politician’s job is to get voters to elect them, then to do things that rich people like, because rich people reward them both before and after they leave office; while in office, rich people take care of politicians’ families, invite them to parties, give them loans, and so on, and after they leave office, rich people reward politicians (and heir families) with lucrative positions in their companies. Rich people pay most of a politician’s salary: They work for them.

This is IMPORTANT. So if you want to know if a politician is one of the rare few you can trust, you need to see that they don’t take the rich’s money, and they don’t vote with the other people who have taken the rich’s money. And you can only really see that once they’ve been in office for awhile.

This is why I trust Corbyn. Because he doesn’t take their money; he barely even accepts money from the government for office expenses AND he has a track record of voting against or for the right things when it was against his personal interest. He has integrity. He is a very rare politician.

When I used to back-office for life insurance agents, I could tell the ones whom I’d recommend because they would sell insurance, often, that earned them less commission, if it was better for their clients. That simple.

For economists, look who they work for and look at their prediction record. Did they come out against the housing bubble early, for example? You can trust Stiglitz because he wrote a book attacking the World Bank that named names and turned other economists against him because he was more concerned about how poor people were being hurt than about what his fellow economists thought. He did something against his own interest. Plus, he’s been right on most issues. Integrity + competence.

If you happen to have a 100 million dollars or so, then you would be justified in saying, “I trust central bankers,” because they are looking out after your interests–though you might wonder if they are competent enough to do so. Still, they’ll do anything for you, they are your dogs: You can trust them. No one else can.

As for the rest: Never trust anyone on commission without doing extensive checks to see if they’re putting their clients’ interests first. If they’ll take a hit in pay to do the right thing, they’re trustowrthy. Remember, most of them work for firms which, whatever their “official policy,” strongly discourage getting lower commissions for any reason.

Intelligence agencies. Well, if you’re stupid enough or naive enough to trust an intelligence agency, I can do nothing for you. Even people who work for intelligence agencies don’t trust intelligence agencies.

With respect to the media, people are extraordinarily stupid. For example, I don’t trust Russia Today (RT) with respect to things that Russia cares about, but they’re very good on things Russia doesn’t care about. What you’re looking for is a media outlet which doesn’t care about the issue in question, which isn’t subject to pressure on that issues, whose owner doesn’t care. The US media is useful in regards to the US, of course, but it is not trustworthy.

Understand?

There are few things which will destroy you faster in life than trusting the wrong person or people, and the metrics you have for trusting individuals in your life don’t work when you try to scale them up to measure organizations, professionals, and so on–people who are not your friends, or in your social circle, or who are not being dealt with as friends and members of your social circle.

The interests of these people do not align with yours, they do not identify with you, and your well-being does not concern them in any meaningful way. Figure out what their interests are, who they identify with, and who they serve, if you want to know what they’ll do and whether you can trust them.

And if you’re looking for the rare politician, broker, or commissioned salesman you can trust, look for the ones willing to go against their own interests–and with a track record of doing so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

What Makes a Good Person?

By

On February 17, 2020

Comments

I was reminiscing today about the few actually good people I’ve known.

Two stand out, my friend Peter, who fought for Hitler; and my old teacher and coach Craig Newell.

I had a bad childhood. My parents were alcoholics, and my father was an angry drunk. Then I went to boarding school, and I was not the sort of kid who did well at boarding school, though the one I went to was well-run and preferable to being at home.

I did not come out of this believing in the goodness of humanity or that authority figures could be trusted. It’s one of the reasons I’m a good analyst in our current situation: I assume people with power are basically scum, and that when they aren’t they do the minimum and do it badly, and I’ve usually been right.

(I can also tell who the few good people are, which is why I supported Corbyn and have no time for the people who lied and smeared him.)

The only person in my life who ever proved completely worthy of trust was Craig Newell. The reason is simple: Mr. Newell (as I called him) had a code, and I NEVER saw him break it. Not ever. He never talked about his code, mind you, but I could tell he had one. He didn’t judge hardly at all, and he was never cruel. I literally never saw him be cruel even once. I never even heard of him being cruel and I did hear of his rectitude (in the best sense).

This isn’t something you can conceal in a place like a boarding school. It is not possible.

He didn’t go out of his way to be kind or good or anything, but he didn’t step away from it when the need was obvious. (As he didn’t with me, if that isn’t clear. And I was not a pleasant teenager.)

What I learned as a child is that most people don’t even meet the responsibilities of their positions (husband, wife, teacher, boss, politicians, whatever). A few do their duty, and I honor them for it, because it is rare. But to go beyond that and actually be a man of honor is unbelievably rare.

Still, Mr. Newell wasn’t as good a man as Peter, though he was more trustworthy. Peter went out of his way to be kind. Mr. Newell wasn’t cruel, and didn’t step away from need, but Peter stepped into need and helped.

Those people who see need and help, even if it is only a little, are, again, incredibly rare.

I tend to like people, and dislike humanity. But I don’t trust either.

Still, good people exist, as do honorable ones.

There is a Jewish myth:

Lamedvavnik (Yiddish: לאַמעדוואָווניק‎), is the Yiddish term for one of the 36 humble righteous ones or Tzadikim mentioned in the kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. According to this teaching, at any given time there are at least 36 holy persons in the world who are Tzadikim. These holy people are hidden; i.e., nobody knows who they are. According to some versions of the story, they themselves may not know who they are. For the sake of these 36 hidden saints, God preserves the world even if the rest of humanity has degenerated to the level of total barbarism. This is similar to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hebrew Bible, where God told Abraham that he would spare the city of Sodom if there was a quorum of at least ten righteous men.

This story largely encompasses how I feel about humanity. Most humans are weak: They aren’t good, bad, or honorable, because they don’t have the strength. It mostly isn’t their (our) fault.

But a few are good, or honorable, and, rarely, both.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 16, 2019

By

On February 16, 2020

Comments

by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

“The U.S. Military Is Not Ready for a Constitutional Crisis” 

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 2-13-20]

I spent nine years on active duty in the U.S. Navy. I served as an aircraft commander, led combat reconnaissance crews, and taught naval history. But the first thing I did upon joining the military, the act that solemnized my obligation, was swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. How strange, then, that despite all of my training, the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted to teaching me how to fly, lead, and teach, not once did I receive meaningful instruction on the document to which I had pledged my life….

I had left the Navy and was in law school when news of the torture memo broke. This was the George W. Bush administration’s attempt to offer a legal justification for “enhanced interrogation.” I had been through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school, the military’s interrogation training program, from which these techniques had been adopted. I understood the “enhanced” methods described by the Bush-administration lawyers for what they were: torture.

At the time, I found it unconscionable that legal scholars would be complicit in underwriting our government’s disregard for the Geneva Conventions. But with the benefit of hindsight, though I still find the torture memo appalling, I can at least acknowledge that the Bush administration cared enough about the law to offer the pretense of legality.

The current administration is not even trying. President Donald Trump openly flouts laws at home, while threatening to destroy cultural sites abroad (a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions).

How State Capacity Drives Industrialization
[Palladium, 2-12-20, via reader of RealEconomics]

These “tools that make the tools” are a crucial piece of modern supply chains, and most advanced manufacturing would be impossible without them. The ability to produce machine tools domestically is one of the foundations of a deep industrial base. Recognizing this, the South Korean state encouraged Hyundai, a chaebol which built the first all-Korean automobile in 1975, to begin making machine tools for the growing domestic market. Since then, the South Korean machine tool industry has grown steadily alongside the Korean economy as a whole. Production today is slightly larger than the machine tool industry of the United States, a country more than six times as populous….

Korea’s story may be more extreme than most, but this type of state-led economic development is how every wealthy country on Earth has industrialized. The sole exception is Britain during the original Industrial Revolution…. Only the state can coordinate many different industries to produce a transformation at the scale of industrialization.

Interesting: even some leading libertarians are beginning to admit society needs government to actively promote the general welfare, though of course, they won’t use such terms. Probably, the spectre of China building a 1,000 bed hospital in ten days has scared the living crap out of them. The USA, by contrast, and thanks in no small part to the popularization of libertarian ideology, can’t even maintain the infrastructure it already has. 

Thy Neighbor’s Solar Panels: When our peers take actions to preserve the planet, we’re more likely to follow suit. How the human instinct to conform could help us address the climate crisis.
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 2-12-20]

Predatory Finance

Read More

Open Thread

By

On February 15, 2020

Comments

Use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

How Capitalism Makes Evil Rational

By

On February 14, 2020

Comments

It’s always worth understanding an important ideology’s ethical calculus.

Capitalism’s is brilliant.

If someone is willing and able to give you money to do something, you are improving their life.

The corollary is:

If you have money, you have it because you have improved someone else’s life. The more you have, the more lives you have improved.

There are assumptions embedded in this logic: That people know what improves their lives, for example, and that everyone involved is buying and selling voluntarily.

Demand isn’t desire, mind you. If you want something that would improve your life a lot, it doesn’t matter if you can’t command enough money to get it. Adam Smith pointed out that bums may want coaches complete with horses, but this does not translate to “demand.”

Still, basically, the theory is that you get money by helping other people.

Roy Dalio, the fund manager famous for his book on principles, believes this one hundred percent.

Now, it’s important to understand that capitalism is an ideology and organizational principle sitting on top of a series of technologies. We can call those technologies “industrialization.” Industrialization is not capitalism; we can imagine there might be other moral and organizational principles which could work with industrialization. We tried, as a species. We called it communism, which was centralized industrial control, and it didn’t work out in the end. Some say that’s because it couldn’t work, others say it’s because the USSR had less people and resources than capitalism, along with a weak strategic position.

I’ve argued parts of both. The truth is we don’t actually know.

Both systems are ideologies which determine who gets to control a certain amount of other people’s time, and who got to tell people what to do. That’s what money does, and anyone who has spent their entire life working for money by doing what other people tell them to do should understand this (though remarkably, many people don’t).

Capitalism is also an argument based on scarcity. It says: “There isn’t enough, so we need to make sure the people who get what we have use it to help others.”

That’s the actual moral argument: Capitalism is the best way to use people and resources to help the most people. It’s why whenever someone suggests there might be another way, someone else will say “Venezuela, Venezuela, neener, neener.”

Here’s a strange thing, though. Every time I look into homelessness I find that there are more empty homes than homeless people. There’s probably an exception, but I’ve never found one in the Western world.

We also throw out far more more food than is needed to feed everyone.

So at the very least, we know that capitalism isn’t distributing goods to everyone who needs them. The capitalist argument to this contradiction isn’t, “That’s false!” It’s that, “Communism failed, so you’re stuck with this.”

Then there’s another issue: Capitalism has turned out to be terrible at managing scarce resources. We could make a lot of things we use more durable so they’d last longer. Instead we make them so they won’t, deliberately. We make them so they’ll break or wear out, and people will have to buy another set, because companies need to make a profit. It’s not that cell phones couldn’t be created to last much longer, it’s that the people who make them don’t want to. The same is true of light bulbs, clothes, almost all electronics, cars, and so on.

We’re wasting vast amounts of resources, and that waste also shows up as vast amounts of pollution and huge destruction of the environment.

Pollution, including pollution involving carbon, methane and other climate change gases is an important example of not managing limited resources. There’s actually a limited amount of room to pollute, and beyond that, the environment starts changing in ways which are dangerous to us and the rest of life. This is a genuine scarcity “pollution sink,” and capitalism isn’t managing it.

It turns out that capitalism (and state communism before it) isn’t very good at managing scarcity. Perhaps it’s better than an opposition which doesn’t exist any more, but it’s not good enough to avoid wiping out island nations and changing the climate catastrophically.

So what we have is a technology which is theoretically capable of managing scarcity (industrialization/science) and an ideology and organizing principle (capitalism) which can not.

We produce way more than we need, vast amounts are wasted, we still have people without homes or going without food, and we’re destroying the environment and changing climate in disastrous ways.

That’s an ideology which is, well, evil. To produce more than we need, and then say, for ideological reasons, “But some people have to sleep on the street, and others need clean out sewers by hand, and still others have to go hungry” is a simple failure. To destroy the ecosphere is another failure.

Capitalism doesn’t do what it is supposed to do: It doesn’t use resources efficiently or distribute them in a humane way. In fact, it uses resources inefficiently, vastly so.

It turns out that “if it makes money” isn’t a good proxy for “does good while using resources efficiently.”

By capitalism’s rules, destroying the world is rational. Not feeding people is rational. Having homes sitting empty while people freeze on the streets is rational. Making way more goods than people need, through planned obsolesence, is rational.

And these aren’t corner cases. This is what the logic leads to. This is the system running on its core logic loops. Someone is paying for all of these things, so it must be making them better off, so therefore doing these things is good. More, the people doing those things are given MORE resources (money) so they can perpetuate same behaviours, because the system assumes the behaviour must be good, or someone wouldn’t be paying for it.

This isn’t just, well, evil. It’s insane.

When your ideology says: “Destroying the world’s climate and environment, starving people, and making people homeless is rational”? There’s a problem with the ideology.

Money helps me write more. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Bernie Wins New Hampshire Primary

By

On February 12, 2020

Comments

He’s only 1.6 percent ahead as of this article, but a win is a win. Buttigieg came in second.

We’ll see if Buttigieg gets any more bounce from this. His national numbers aren’t that great, but his New Hampshire numbers weren’t good until his showing in Iowa.

Bernie and Buttigieg got nine delegates each, Klobucharg received six, no one else got any. This means in delegates, Buttigieg is still one delegate ahead.

Feel free to discuss in comments, etc…

Update: Oh no, the media isn’t biased at all.

Update 2: Interesting exit poll demographic numbers.

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up and You Can’t Give It Away

By

On February 11, 2020

Comments

I have a friend who is a serious meditator. For many years, when someone asked him to help them become enlightened, he would teach them a simple meditation, then instruct: “Do that for six months, every day, for one hour. Then return.” He called it “the very minimum required.”

Over the years, people have come to me wanting some of what I have, intellectually. Not a lot of people, more than five, less than ten.

In every case, I have given them a list of books to read, and said: “As you read each book, get back to me, and we’ll discuss them.”

Only one person ever did, he is the only person I ever charged money for teaching.

You can’t give the good stuff, the actually valuable stuff, away.

He read five books or so, we talked about them, and I gave him assignments and we discussed the assignments. He then stopped, because he had what he wanted, which was to learn how to learn more effectively, and he had proved this to himself by using the skills he was taught, and I was charging him enough money that it mattered to him (not a lot, but he wasn’t rich).

Back when I did some consulting, in the 2000s, I noticed something similar: When I didn’t charge people enough, or said, “Oh, I’ll help you for free,” they never took my advice. If I made them bleed, they did what I said and benefited.

You can’t give it away. I really wish you could.

Anyway, this is a winding intro to my point, which is that if you want to actually understand certain topics, you have to read. A lot.

Let’s run some numbers. From the time I was eight through to age 12, I read at least two books a day. I know this because I went to the library once a week and took out the limit, and I also checked books out of the school library, and I read my father’s books. Actually, I read more than two books a day. Call it 700 a year, so 3,500 books.

From age thirteen to thirty-five, we’ll count it at a book a day. 7,700 books.

From 35 to the end of 45 (11 years), I read two books a week, because I was blogging and reading online articles (they are not a substitute, online content is mostly trash). So 1,100 books, though the proportion of non-fiction books was higher than before.

And for the last four years, I’ve been back to one or more a day, but we’ll count it as one a day. Add another 1,400.

Total? Thirteen thousand, seven hundred books. Put it at 90 percent fiction, and 10 percent non fiction, so about 1,370 non-fiction books.

This is an understatement, at every point I have gone with the lowest estimate. It is not unusual, even today, for me to read three books in a day. Sometimes I read four. The real number is probably close to twenty thousand.

This is not meant as a brag and should not be taken as such. By most people’s standards, my life is trash and I didn’t read so much because “discipline,” I did it because I like reading books and thinking about ideas. If I enjoyed making money, working out, meditating, and eating healthy as much as I liked books and games, well, I’d have a rather different life.

But I have read a lot of books. I have thought about what I read. I have discussed what I read with other people.

Because I have read those books, I can think using the knowledge they contained. You cannot think with knowledge you do not know, and you cannot even look up most Knowledge, because you have to know what you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know.

If you want to engage in the life of ideas, you have to read. You have to read a lot.

Yes, someone like me can make it easier. I’ve read a lot of not very useful books. I can say: “These are the most useful ones!” But you still have to go read them, think about them, and integrate them into your worldview. You need to be able to restate their arguments, and you need to understand the model they are using, and you need to know the assumptions upon which they are based, and you need to know the problems with all of those things, and why it matters and doesn’t matter.

There are shorter roads, but there are no shortcuts, if you really want to know. You just have to read, and then you have to work with what you read. (If this means math, you’ve got to do the math until it integrates. If it’s about human body movements, you’ve got to do the movements. If it’s about “spirituality” you have to actually meditate enough to get the basic insights.)

Discipline is shit. Discipline is only the main tool at the start. If you don’t start enjoying what you’re doing, why the hell are you doing it? The biggest mistake I made intellectually was spending years trying to figure out how economies work because I thought, “Shit, these people (economists, policy makers) are making things worse. I’d better figure it out!”

I did, but it was a lot less fun than the topics I really cared about. (Though it all came around in the end, because it turned out that the technical details were secondary to things like identity, ideology, organization, and all the stuff I write about in “Construction of Reality.”)

Most people have the curiosity and joy of reading and learning beaten out of them by our school system, which seems designed to be one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-wonder ways of “learning” one can imagine. It makes people into machines; spewing out the answer teach wants, talking only when allowed, sitting, and hating.

I mostly ignored school and would even read books in class when I could. My grades were middling, but I was learning.

You want to learn? Find the wonder in it. Find what’s cool and interesting. Yeah, you’ll have to power through some shit, but it’s worth it if you care.

But don’t think you can skip the actual work. Reading for intellectual work is like drills for athletic work, or whatever.

Just figure out why it’s worth doing.

Again, you can’t think with information you don’t know. You cannot look information up you don’t know you don’t know. Any system for which you do not understand the underlying axioms and assumptions, which you try to use, is actually using you. You are just a machine, doing what the creator(s) wanted.

So read and think.

And find it fun!

Money helps me write more. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Page 2 of 3

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén