Links

"It’s better to pay attention to something that is being scorned than something that’s being championed." --Warren Buffett (2005) 

What Warren Buffett's Teacher Would Make of Today's Market - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

A Thread on Diversification - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Amazon's Size Is Becoming a Problem---for Amazon ($) (LINK)

Degrees of Confidence - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Think Again – a Big Think Podcast: Jared Diamond (LINK)

Related book: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

Capital Allocators Podcast: Michael Mauboussin – Who’s on the Other Side (LINK)

Related paper: Who Is On the Other Side?

Exponent Podcast: A Perfect Meal (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran chats with Meb Faber (podcast) (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: The Uber IPO (LINK)

Mark Zuckerberg & Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation (video) (LINK)

When the first stars in the Universe exploded, they really exploded - by Phil Plait (LINK)

TED Talk: Sleep is your superpower | Matt Walker (LINK)

[I'm a bit late to these, but...] The Bruce Lee Library episodes of the Bruce Lee Podcast look especially worth checking out.... Such as the episode on the Tao Te Ching and the episode on Krishnamurti's Commentaries on Living.

"Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own." --Bruce Lee

Links

"The idea that life is a series of adversities and that each one is an opportunity to behave well instead of badly is a very, very good idea." -Charlie Munger

For those in the U.S., the first episode of Planet Earth II airs tomorrow (Saturday) on BBC America (LINK)

Elon Musk Is Really Boring (LINK)

What Matters Most - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Five Good Questions for Erik Kobayashi-Solomon about his book The Intelligent Options Investor (video) (LINK)

A 10-minute video from Nassim Taleb about public (mis)understanding of risk (LINK)

Exponent podcast: Episode 104 — Snap’s Gingerbread Strategy (LINK)

Paul Mason: "PostCapitalism" | Talks at Google (video) (LINK)

James Gleick: "Time Travel: A History" | Talks at Google (video) (LINK)

Take a Break from Your Frantic Day & Let Alan Watts Introduce You to the Calming Ways of Zen (video) (LINK)

Related book: The Way of Zen

Jared Diamond in conversation with Richard Dawkins - The Use of Religion (video) (LINK) [Related books: Diamond, Dawkins]

Yosemite's rare 'firefall' phenomenon attracts tourists and photographers [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Book of the day (given Munger's praise of Maimonides at the Daily Journal meeting): Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds

Links

Charlie Munger on Avoiding Computers (LINK)

REPLAY: Ask-Me-Anything Session with Guy Spier (LINK)

Related book: The Education of a Value Investor

David Tepper: Good time to take money off the table (video) (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran: What's in a name? Of Umlauts, The Alphabet and World Peace! (LINK)

Car Crashes Are on the Rise, and Warren Buffett Blames Texting [H/T Linc] (LINK)

“If cars are better—and they clearly are—drivers must be worse (adjusted for mileage),” Mr. Buffett said in an email. Given that mileage is up only around 3%, Mr. Buffett said he found it hard to draw any other inference from the data than distracted driving to explain the much larger jump in fatalities this year.

Warren Buffett: Poverty In The U.S. 'Makes No Sense' (LINK)

The Bloomberg Terminal, a Wall Street Fixture, Faces Upstarts (LINK)

New York Global Group Chief Charged With Securities Fraud (LINK)

Benjamin Wey, a Wall Street financier who helped numerous Chinese companies get access to U.S. markets through “reverse mergers,” was arrested Thursday and charged with manipulating the companies’ shares to allegedly net himself tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION POWERED BY ARM (LINK)

What Economics and Public Policy Can Learn from Engineering Design (audio) (LINK)

Related book: Applied Minds: How Engineers Think

What Is Coding? (LINK)

Related books:  

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software 

But How Do It Know? - The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone

Brain Pickings: Jared Diamond on the Root of Inequality and How the Mixed Blessings of “Civilization” Warped Our Relationship to Daily Risk (LINK)

Related book: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 

Related documentary (DVD): Guns, Germs, and Steel [Also on YouTube, HERE.]

The Worst Crime in History - by Yuval Noah Harari

Excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind...

Link to excerpt: The Worst Crime in History

Today, the majority of large animals on planet earth are domesticated farm animals that live and die as cogs in the wheels of industrial agriculture. Earth is home to about 7 billion humans, weighing together about 300 million tons. It is also home to several dozen billion farm animals – cows, pigs, chickens and so forth – whose total biomass is about 700 millions tons. In contrast, if you took all the large wild animals left on earth – all the penguins, baboons, alligators, dolphins, wolves, tune fish, lions and elephants – and put them on a very large scale, they will weigh together less than 100 million tons.

The disappearance of wildlife is a calamity of unprecedented magnitude, but the plight of the planet’s majority population—the farm animals—is cause for equal concern. In recent years there is growing awareness of the conditions under which these animals live and die, and their fate may well turn out to be the greatest crime in human history. If you measure crimes by the sheer amount of pain and misery they inflict on sentient beings, this radical claim is not implausible. 

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Related previous post: "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" – 1987 article by Jared Diamond

Related videos:

Yuval Harari's Talk at Google

(Not the best audio on the 2 videos below)

Yuval Noah Harari & Jared Diamond - Part 1

Yuval Noah Harari & Jared Diamond - Part 2

Jared Diamond: The Evolution of Religions

Link to video

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To check out Jared Diamond's books, go HERE.

Jared Diamond on the Bryan Callen podcast

The discussion on religion from 33:10 to 46:52 was especially interesting.

Link to podcast: Ep96 – Jared Diamond

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Related books:

The World Until Yesterday

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Collapse

Related recent post: Jared Diamond, "The Third Chimpanzee" | Talks at Google

Jared Diamond, "The Third Chimpanzee" | Talks at Google

A new version of The Third Chimpanzee aimed at a younger audience from his original text. It kind of reminds me of what Richard Dawkins did with The Magic of Reality.


Link

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Related book: The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (or Kindle format)

TED Talk - Jared Diamond: How societies can grow old better

Link

The science interview: Jared Diamond

Found via The Big Picture.

The provocative insights of the bestselling author have won him a huge following – and the disdain of some academics. He discusses criticism, gall bladders and what the west can learn from other societies

Jared Diamond interview

If the embedded video doesn't play, try clicking on THIS link.


Jared Diamond from Nautilus on Vimeo.

Nassim Taleb quotes

From Antifragile:

Squeezes are exacerbated by size. When one is large, one becomes vulnerable to some errors, particularly horrendous squeezes. The squeezes become nonlinearly costlier as size increases. 

In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times. Some economists have been wondering why mergers of corporations do not appear to play out. The combined unit is now much larger, hence more powerful, and according to the theories of economies of scale, it should be more “efficient.” But the numbers show, at best, no gain from such increase in size—that was already true in 1978, when Richard Roll voiced the “hubris hypothesis,” finding it irrational for companies to engage in mergers given their poor historical record. Recent data, more than three decades later, still confirm both the poor record of mergers and the same hubris as managers seem to ignore the bad economic aspect of the transaction. There appears to be something about size that is harmful to corporations. 

As with the idea of having elephants as pets, squeezes are much, much more expensive (relative to size) for large corporations. The gains from size are visible but the risks are hidden, and some concealed risks seem to bring frailties into the companies. 

Large animals, such as elephants, boa constrictors, mammoths, and other animals of size tend to become rapidly extinct. Aside from the squeeze when resources are tight, there are mechanical considerations. Large animals are more fragile to shocks than small ones—again, stone and pebbles. Jared Diamond, always ahead of others, figured out such vulnerability in a paper called “Why Cats Have Nine Lives.” If you throw a cat or a mouse from an elevation of several times their height, they will typically manage to survive. Elephants, by comparison, break limbs very easily.

Bill Gates reviews Jared Diamond's book "The World Until Yesterday"

Diamond starts with the premise that human beings were hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and only settled down when we began farming about 10,000 years ago. So most of our genetic selection has been done in a hunter-gatherer environment. He argues that we can learn a lot by studying hunter-gatherer societies in places like New Guinea, where he has spent much of his career. (He uses the term New Guinea to refer to the island that is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.)

He describes several areas in particular, like raising children, dealing with the elderly, and eating well. He doesn’t romanticize these societies, as I thought he might, or make some grand pronouncement that they all do these things better than we do. He just wants to find the best practices and share them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find much deep wisdom in the lessons that Diamond documents. But I found the book fascinating anyway.

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Book: The World Until Yesterday

Related previous posts:

Jared Diamond: Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers

"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" – 1987 article by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond: Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers

This is an excerpt from his new book (which comes out on 12/31) The World Until Yesterday.

I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-­confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly ­telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for ­several years, far more social models available to children through ­allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

Three Reasons Japan’s Economic Pain Is Getting Worse – By Jared Diamond

Japan’s economic problems are serious and getting worse. Foremost among them is the crushing burden of government debt.

Japan’s ratio of government debt to gross domestic product, currently about 2.28, is by far the highest in the industrial world, almost double that of even Greece and Italy, and steadily growing. Already, the combined costs of interest on that debt and social security are approximately equal to total government tax revenue.

Japan’s trade balance is about to go negative for the first time since 1980. Land values and Nikkei stock values have fallen to about 30 percent of 1989 levels. Now, educated young Japanese women are emigrating, Japanese companies are shifting production overseas (even to the U.S.), national politics are in gridlock (six prime ministers in the past five years), and last year Japan experienced its first mass street protests in decades.

The economic troubles are symptoms of at least three sets of deeper social problems. Regardless of what policies Japan now adopts, its troubles can only increase unless those social problems are solved. While all three of these also beset other industrial societies, certain local attitudes make them more severe in Japan.

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To an outside admirer of Japan like me, its opposition to sustainable resource use seems sad and self-destructive. Unrealistic quests for resources drove the country to self- destructive behavior once before, when it made war simultaneously on China, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Defeat today is as inevitable as it was then -- this time, not by military conquest, but by exhaustion of both renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. If I were the evil dictator of another country who hated Japan and wanted to ruin it without resort to war, I would do exactly what Japan is now doing to itself: destroy the overseas resource bases on which it depends.

"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" – 1987 article by Jared Diamond

Link to article: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

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Related books:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Related article: Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?

Will Big Business Save the Earth? – By Jared Diamond

Found via Simoleon Sense.

THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.

But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.

As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.

Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.

Diamond’s celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs and Steel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.

The question lurking in Diamond’s work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias’s trunkless legs of stone?

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Related books:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Related previous post: Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?