Pervasiveness of the Capitalist-Consumerist Ideal
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ The capitalist-consumerist ethic is […]
Warren Buffett on Brand Moats
Following Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (later joined by Bill Gates) have a tradition of doing more than a few interviews. Here’s a snippet from their 07-May-2018 interview (video, transcript) with CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box,” You’ve gotta have a product that’s strong enough that the realer—retailer has to […]
Warren Buffett: There’s No Degree of Difficulty Adjustment for Value Investing
At the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, Warren Buffett opined that there’s no “degree of difficulty” adjustment for investing: One of the interesting things about investment is that there’s no degree of difficulty factor. I mean, if you’re going to go diving in the Olympics and try to win a gold medal, you get paid […]
The Wisdom of the Heart
Gaylon Ferguson writes in Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With, Mindfulness opens the doorway into a fuller experience of the heart, the richly rewarding yet volatile realm of emotions. The practice of being present is valuable not only for the mental sharpness it brings to decision-making but also for providing fertile ground […]
Hardening Our Hearts
Pema Chodron writes in Practicing Peace in Times of War, This is a familiar scenario in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities, even when we’re just driving our cars. We’re just driving along and someone cuts in front of us and then what? Well, we don’t like it, so we roll down the […]
Charlie Munger on Changing a Big Bureaucratic Culture
At the Daily Journal Corporation Annual Shareholders’ Meeting 2018 (14-Feb-2018,) Charlie Munger opined about big bureaucratic cultures and organizational change: What big businesses have in common by and large is that they get very bureaucratic. That’s the one norm in culture is that they get very bureaucratic. And of course it happens to the government […]
Warren Buffett on Speculation
Following Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (later joined by Bill Gates) have a tradition of doing more than a few interviews. Here’s a snippet from their 07-May-2018 interview (video, transcript) with CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box,” When we buy a business we look at what the business earns and […]
Making Money Easily in the Stock Market
From Benjamin Graham & David Dodd’s Security Analysis: The cardinal defect of instability may not be regarded, therefore, as menacing the long-range development of common stocks as a whole. It does indeed exert a powerful temporary effect upon all business through the variations of the economic cycle, and it has permanently adverse effects upon individual […]
A Culture That Fetishizes Individual Preference
William Falk, Editor-in-chief of The Week, comments about the broader social trend of asserting individual expression as epitomized by the trend of taking “emotional support” animals on planes: As David Leonhardt put it in The New York Times this week [Link], the support animal is one more piece of proof we live in a culture […]
Indonesia’s Nostalgia for the Suharto Era
Quoting Endy Bayuni’s editorial in The Jakarta Post, The Week wrote, There’s a lot of nostalgia these days for the Suharto era, said Endy Bayuni. As Indonesia begins to search for candidates for the next presidential election, in 2019, posters and memes of the dictatorwho ruled from 1967 to 1998-have gone viral. The most common […]