Action Figure Daniel

Category: Notes

  • “The Chickenshit Club” by Jesse Eisinger

    • DOJ lost credibility after Enron, with a run of failed cases
    • Prosecution needs to happen quickly, before the trail goes cold
    • Task forces can run fast but lack context and roots
    • Arthur Anderson literally resulted in the notion of “Too Big To Fail”
    • Non-criminal cases have to prove intent
    • Sporken used consent decrees to force companies to do their own auditing and oversight
    • Accountants can be duped, like anyone else
    • “The company could not go to jail.”
    • Grand juries stopped being used as an evidence gathering tool
    • Gresham’s law: Copper coins drive out good gold ones

  • “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson

    • Happy people don’t need to remind themselves they are happy
    • The more you focus on what you lack, the more you feel bad for your lack
    • You only have so much time and energy to care about things
    • Not caring does not mean being indifferent
    • Find stuff you want to deal with
    • “Finding something meaningful might be the most important thing to do in your life”
    • Sometimes, it is okay for things to not be okay
    • Suffering is biologically necessary to drives us to change
    • Happiness comes from solving problems
    • Negative emotions are a reminder that something is wrong
    • Question your emotions
    • “What pain do you want to sustain?” (what are you willing to fight to get)
    • “The true measure of self-worth is how a person feels about their failures.”
    • “Measure yourself by more mundane identities”; this gives up your entitlements and the high bar
    • Ask if you are wrong about your assumptions
      • “What would it mean if I were wrong?”
      • “Would being wrong create a better or worse problem for myself or others?”
      • It is more likely you are wrong rather than everyone else
    • “VCR questions” because the answer is easy to everyone else
    • “Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen”
    • You don’t know anything, so what is there to lose
    • When you don’t know what to do, just do something
    • “Inspiration is a reward, not a prerequisite”
    • Honesty builds trust
    • Our character comes from what we choose to reject
    • Entitled people take responsibility for others instead of themselves
    • Ask how the relationship would change if you refused
      • If something bad would happen then there are issues in the relationship
    • Conflict helps us to learn who we can trust
    • Commitments frees you by limiting your options
    • Greatness and success are different

  • “Breakneck” by Dan Wang

    • China focuses on an “Engineering state” while the US is a “Lawyer state”
    • Lawyers have spread throughout the US economy, even pushing out economists
    • Law focuses on procedures over outcome
    • China provides very few social services
    • Because planning is already done, funding can be deployed really quickly
    • Smartphones create so many spare components that new things can be fashioned cheaply and easily
    • China’s tech advances have surged
    • It is difficult to maintain know-how without running people through the process
    • Forced technology transfers actually hurt local firms because they don’t develop the experience of researching
    • The US likes to claim invention but usually seeds manufacturing to others
    • China took infrequent, imprecise census making it difficult to manage the population
    • The shortages that led up the One Child Policy were caused by socialism, not population
    • The rich are leaving China because of the government whiplash
    • Engineering state is better at stockpiling
    • China is trying to be more like Germany than the US
    • DOGE should focus on reducing processes instead of personnel
    • The US needs to re-embrace its engineering roots
    • “Developing [nation]” is a term to embrace with pride

  • “Bird School” by Adam Nicolson

    • Birds are literally afraid of being watched
    • Butterfly wing “eyes” are meant to scare birds
    • Nature needs a balance of occasional destruction with time to recover
    • Fuzziness is needed to imagine other lives
    • Wrens are very productive and promiscuous
    • Birds with big eyes can “see” the day earlier and so sing earlier
    • Bird eyes are huge!
    • They sing in a combination of preference and when there is room in for them in the acoustic space
    • “Singing is expensive”
    • Males tend to sing more often than females
    • Female robin sing to be fed; the longer the male ignores her the louder and closer to the border she sings
    • Owls auditory nerve runs by the optical center so they may “see” sound
    • Owls can’t see well in the dark (about the same as us), instead they rely almost entirely on sound and memory
    • Ravens evolved with us
    • Juvenile ravens roam in murders looking for food and new territories
      • They will mob resident crows to get their way, but only if they have the numbers
    • Bird perception is really high; eels are around 14 pulse a second, humans are 60, birds are over 100
    • Birds have two voice boxes with incredible precision
    • Parts of the brain that control song expand in the spring and contract in the fall
    • For some birds, they are born with a compass but have to learn the route
    • Song birds needs a little blue light (starlight) to effectively “see” the magnetosphere, leading to them migrating mostly at night
    • Bird feeders and houses reshape the local population to the birds who favor the food or are aggressive
    • The best way to promote native birds is to provide native food

  • “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham

    • Don’t follow the market… Dollar cost averaging is the way to go
    • Adoption of a product does not mean long-term profit or success
      • Air travel took off but experienced such problems that it had very poor returns
    • Stocks are riskier the higher they go
    • Only buy stocks that you would be comfortable holding even if you can’t see the share prices on a daily basis
    • Specific patterns in the past do not hold up in the future
      • (Markets are inherently resistant to “hacking”)
    • There is a world of difference between “hindsight earnings” and real world earnings
    • Concentration makes the ultra-wealthy but not the regular-wealthy
    • Don’t keep all your funds at home
    • “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” Spinoza
    • Never buy or sell immediately after a large movement
    • Strong performing mutual funds don’t last
    • Diversify!
    • Covering your downside is never worth giving up most of your upside
    • Fixed exchange rates are tempting but are very difficult to maintain
    • If Crypto currency succeeds, it will be co-opted by governments