lexicography.com

Either Iraq will get better or it will not.

US Corporations are frozen with hundreds of billions of dollars accumulating and no clear idea what to do with it. Investing in the wrong place will lead to a new management team if your competitor waits and invests in a better place.

Never has so much economic potential been locked behind so impenetrable doors.

It is the exact opposite of the American Century when investing and producing was so simple. Now, everyone is frozen by indecision. Failure to move will be its own punishment as the early movers reap all the rewards.

Unusual times.

I’m pretty old. Didn’t Confucius say that everyone under thirty should be afforded respect because one never knew if they would achieve some sort of greatness in the future?

There ain’t much future for me, nor much chance of greatness.

Still for those who would like to know the credentials, I have had some interesting adventures.

I was a poor student in high school and went to an undistinguished college. After years of work I decided upon law school. I got 788 out of a possible 800 in the law school admissions test. That got me rejections from all the top tier law schools I applied to. My initial premise was I would go to law school if I could get into a major one, otherwise I could just go on with my life. Why pay $120K and give up three years unless there is a big payoff?

After that experience I reevaluated and tried again with many schools, I got into a strong regional school, and after completing the first year ended up near the top of the class (not a surprise given my new work ethic and my LSAT measured aptitude).

I transfered to the University of California, Berkeley, a major law school in anyone’s book. I worked six years on Wall Street. I once did a deal which culminated in gathering a Federal Reserve Bank check of over nine hundred million dollars (good as cash, understand that a Citibank check for nine hundred million dolars may or my not be good) and it was all based on my judgment and work. I suffered sleep deprivation and could not focus my 30 year old eyes.

I got interested in the Internet and started my own ISP. When my law firm merged and it did not look so good for people like me, I resigned and made my Internet company successful. It was the best thing I ever did.

So I do have some credentials.

Bye All

New Sisyphus

Lyrics and Music
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Instapundit.com - Terms of Use

In exchange for the access to InstaPundit content described above, you agree not to sue InstaPundit for its content, whether original or linked or quoted from another source, in any court, on any grounds whatsoever in law or equity

You also agree to pay Insta one million dollars if you do decide to sue Insta. Lets hope you do no tune in one day and see a nice bevy of defamatory material about yourself or a bunch of your copyrighted works reprinted in full.

Personally, I think his terms of use page is pretty typical law professor work. CNN could flash similar terms across the screen at the start of each broadcast but any lawyer charging by the hour at CNN client type rates would never write such bunk.

And does anyone else think it is kind of strange that Instapundit (part of the pajama empire) still solicits donations from readers? I mean, his site must be worth a few million dollars, does he still request the $10 donation from the average Internet user in “support”? Does one still get a personal thank-you email for a $10 donation?

I just spent the last nine days camping and off road cycling in very southern Arizona.

The Internet said that Tucson had lows of 30-40 degrees, so my 25 degree rated sleeping bag should be fine. Well, we were at altitude, my eyebrows frosted and one morning the therm read 18.

I had the best time ever!

We rode mountain bikes among cacti, naturally I hit a teddy bear with my hand on the first day. Three great cactus pears attached themselves to my hand with one inch barbed spikes. As a type one diabetic who takes five steel needle injections a day, I calmly pulled out the spines without histrionics. Down the path a young girl landed in a prickly pear to much howling. Hitting cacti was not a big part of the trip, but riding among rocks and loose ground at speed with aggressive nature at hand was interesting. As a road biker, I was flat out amazed of the ground you could cover on a mountain bike. A 45 degree grade of large loose rocks is not considered challenging.

Most nights I stayed awake, cold. I added a coat, then hat, to my sleeping gear.

After the last day, my wife booked a luxury hotel for the contrast. They had a picture perfect garden of cactus and one purple prickly pear attracted my attention. It did not seem to have any spines. I ran my finger along the nude edges. A hundred itchy hair thin spines implanted themselves into my index finger and could not be removed for days.

The mountains, the desert, the people, camping without electricity, cellphone, diversion, all made a memorable trip. In Pantagonia, the Velvit Evlis pizza place deserves a visit.

BTW: border patrol stopped us to talk about five times, drones flew overhead at night, locals said “mules” ran drugs and to not notice anything or report anything. We were within a dozen miles of Mexico and things are certainly hightened.

One of the most popular blogs will soon be no more. Why I will Stop Blogging : Scripting News: 3/13/2006

In all fields, people retire, but in Internet self-publishing there is a constant exodus of people. I guess the lack of monetary renumeration explains lots of it. Done well. blogging takes time. Time is money. There is a certain compensation in participating in the greater conversation. Still the cost is great, the rewards small. Our life is made of time and finite. It is understandable that even the most popular bloggers withdraw.

The ability to keep someone alive by replacing one or more of their major organs is an astounding achievement of 20th-century medicine. Unfortunately, the current supply of transplant organs is much lower than the need or demand for them, which means that thousands of people die every year in the U.S. alone for lack of a replacement organ.

Ethical Considerations in Organ Transplants

To which I answer
there is another way.

Three Things I don’t Worry About Anymore:

(1) The Left. A remarkable machine but I believe the end of the USSR sealed its fate. The old agitprop survives, a week ago a doctor friend spit at me that money and profit determines what medical procedures are done. Remarkable that voluntary agreement among people to freely exchange things they value is so hated. The alternative would be - - - chains and guns determining what medical procedures are done or not done.

I mean how else would you get a doctor to come into the hospital on any given afternoon and give up his free time with his family and perform services for you unless you offered him money or required him to do it on threat of punishment?

Notwithstanding the elite hate, you can almost feel the worldwide rush to capitalism. The few countries still placing faith in planned economies will soon be trying to scapegoat the United States in some way, but the pattern of capitalism/increasing wealth planned/scapegoat-someone is becoming perceptible to everyone.

(2) All predictions of doom founded on extrapolation or continua ton of present trends. Mark Steyn, who I enjoy reading so much I search out new stuff constantly, warns that in 2030 there will be no more twenty five year old ethnic Italians than there were ethnic Italian babies born in 2005, is guilty of this. Italians are an endangered species halving their population every decade soon to disappear into insignificance while new owners occupy their real estate. I do not believe it. For it to be true, present trends have to continue. The populations of Italians may decline for years, or events may change things. Extrapolation of existing trends gives you GE, Microsoft and Cisco encompassing the entire capital base of the country while Google does not exist.

The West is in decline, but it is because of cultural insecurity and various moderately successful attacks in the realm of ideas. The idea that productive wombs are more important than productive minds is simply foolish. [edit out stupid remark.]

(3) The coming police state. Sadly, understanding of political freedom is lacking in our fellow citizens, specially out younger citizens. No one can doubt, watching the progression from 200 years ago to now, that the State expands its power at every opportunity and resistance fails regularly and the mess of laws and regulations expands forever. Ten years ago I would be with you lamenting the irrevocable loss of freedom. Today, I see tools available never before available. The table has been upset, and the table has been stacked towards central direction and elite determination of the issues and control of the discussion for a long time.

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » If Hollywood Were Really Brave

Courage

That stands to reason, doesn’t it? We wouldn’t consider courage a great virtue if it were the rule rather than the exception. We wouldn’t celebrate courageous men and their deeds if they were many and not few. All the same, it’s rather a shame. Courage is so central to the attainment of a good and worthy life, so irreplaceable as the fuel for worthy deeds, that a shortfall of it cannot be made up by an oversupply of any other asset.

AOL and Yahoo Charge For ‘Business Class’ Email

I’m all for a charge to send email. The sender should not pay the company providing the email account of the sender or the company providing the email account of the recipient; the sender should pay the recipient. The charge should be compensation for my attention, my time in even considering the communication you want to convey to me.

I’ll pay everyone I send an email to one cent per email if everyone who sends me an email pays me one cent. Probably, I get as many emails as I send and it will be a wash or cost me less than $ 10.00 per year. Spammers, however, could never pay one cent for every email they send - their model depends on others carrying the cost of their messages with no fraction of the cost imposed on them in any way.

Companies routinely pay millions of dollars through advertising, direct mail, displays, solicitations, &etc. to try to get the attention of consumers. A slice of that should go directly to the people they are trying to reach?

It’s great to stumble on a writing that expresses exactly what you think. I always thought that “money” gets less moral respect than it deserves, that “wealth” is thought of, erroneously, as the product of taking more than your fair share of some arrangement or other and that “wealth” in the aggregate leads to political and military power.

It is refreshing to read someone who says just that, and who can write “make wealth” and means it literally.

Anyway, an excerpt, but this is one you definitely should read in whole:

If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. [3] Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

How to Make Wealth

ADDITION

I simply have to add another quote:

Until recently even governments sometimes didn’t grasp the distinction between money and wealth. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, v:i) mentions several that tried to preserve their “wealth” by forbidding the export of gold or silver. But having more of the medium of exchange would not make a country richer; if you have more money chasing the same amount of material wealth, the only result is higher prices.

All this concern about the balance of payments and the imbalance of the current accounts is foolish; we are exporting a medium of exchange and importing wealth. At the time of the transaction the values on either side are equal because the importing and exporting is voluntary exchange.