Quote of the Day....

Open and general public discussions about things outside of Lakewood.

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Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Sat Sep 03, 2016 8:52 pm

Quoted without comment....

"You may know society is doomed when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you; [and] when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice."

-Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged", 1957


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Sun Sep 18, 2016 12:01 pm

“What we generally call participation in the political process, the IYI (Intellectual Yet Idiot) calls by two distinct designations: 'democracy' when it fits the IYI, and 'populism' when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.”

-Nassim Taleb (Sept. 16, 2016, from The Intellectual Yet Idiot)

Pretty insightful for a mathematician! Even though he ditched Wall Street to apply his probabilistic inclinations to philosophy, which I enjoy learning about.

The entire article takes less than 10 minutes to read from this very moment until you’re done, and is well worth it. More excoriation of our “leadership.” Please, if you have a great urge to exercise your sociopathic tendencies by way of governance, you should at least be right about stuff. Don’t you think?


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Sun Oct 09, 2016 4:46 pm

Been saving this one. Just read DL and I thought I'd throw it out there....

“How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

Now with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.”


-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Seem familiar?


Lori Allen _
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Lori Allen _ » Mon Oct 10, 2016 8:53 am

Good quote Tim. Reminds of our alleged corrupt city leaders we have right here in Lakewood. There motto appears to be "stealing Lakewood, one property at a time, one dollar at a time."


jackie f taylor
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby jackie f taylor » Sat Oct 15, 2016 5:23 pm

lol, Hilarious, wish I were smart enough to post this on facebook.... just great......


Tim Liston
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Fri Nov 25, 2016 2:21 pm

As cited by The Heart Foundation (link here)....

"In the United States, someone has a heart attack every 34 seconds."

All I can say is it must really suck to be that guy!

:lol:


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Sun Dec 11, 2016 10:24 am

“If I only had three words of advice, they would be, ‘tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I'd add, ‘all the time.’”

-Randy Pausch, author of “The Last Lecture”, 2006

Pausch’s “Last Lecture” is a veritable quote farm, ranging from the flighty to the dead serious. Click here to watch it on youtube. It’s over an hour long, but well worth it as its 20 million views attest. It seems somewhat relevant these days, locally and nationally. I first listened to the Last Lecture around 2011, a couple years before my youngest began her four years at CMU. Inspiring stuff….


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Wed Feb 08, 2017 4:53 am

To Jim’s post about Romania (rather obliquely)….

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”

-Carl Sagan (May 1996)


Tim Liston
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Sun Feb 26, 2017 9:31 pm

“You don’t need a parachute to go skydiving. You need a parachute to go skydiving twice….”

-Josh Brown, from "Just A Thought" (click here) in a discussion of investment risk. I thought it was funny and timely.

Like a lot of people, I have a 401k and other investments. So I make it a point to try to be informed, with both conventional and unconventional wisdoms. Three investment bloggers I read when I have the time….

”Downtown” Josh Brown, "The Reformed Broker"

Ben Carlson, "A Wealth of Common Sense"

Barry Ritholtz, "The Big Picture"

The three are well-acquainted with each other. They are can be a bit unconventional but practical, and sometimes funny. If you have much money in the financial markets I recommend them.

Good luck….


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Tue Apr 11, 2017 6:16 am

“What if the American people learn the truth, that our foreign policy has nothing to do with our national security, that it never changes from one administration to the next.”

-Ron Paul, February 12, 2009, in his famous 3.5 minute “What If” speech on the floor of Congress (click here)….

Here we go again. Dammit….


Tim Liston
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Thu May 25, 2017 1:47 pm

“CDBG is a great federal program because it gives flexibility to local officials and residents as to how these funds should be spent, rather than having Washington dictate our local needs.”

-Thomas George, former Lakewood Mayer, from another LO thread some time ago

(I mostly wrote this post months ago, now seems like a good time to tweak and publish it….)

I met Tom many years back. Tom seems like a good, straightforward guy. But I don’t understand how any program that takes money from a group of people, then takes a big cut for itself, and finally returns what’s left of it back to those same people more or less, but with numerous federal government strings attached can be described as a “great program.” It’s a terrible program, almost by definition.

How about this program instead? How about not taking our money in the first place and letting US decide how (and if) our money should be used within our community….

Here’s the thing. I long-ago stopped believing that everyday people can “drain the swamp,” or even want to. Because, increasingly, everyday people ARE the swamp. Not so much Goldman Sachs.

For a short time Trump froze the (non-military) federal workforce. Big deal. The non-military federal workforce has hovered around two million for 50+ years. What HAS grown several times over is the Federal “proxy government” workforce, namely much of (1) state and local government proxies, (2) private contractor proxies and (3) non-profit proxies (at least the non-profits with the “right” political views). These various entities all receive substantial funding from the federal government totaling hundreds of billions of dollars annually. That’s a considerable swamp, tens of millions of people whose employers receive substantial federal government “grants.” The kind of money Goldman Sachs and their ilk put together can only dream of….

I’ll bet the Beck Center thinks that the National Endowment for the Arts “is a great federal program because it gives flexibility to local arts organizations to spend taxpayer dollars on creative endeavors” or some such thing. We all know how the Cleveland Clinic covets its non-profit status and government ties, and Medicaid block grants to the states. For sure the non-profit higher education complex is getting fat off of over $1 trillion in Federally-insured non-dischargeable student loans. Not to mention the K-12 sector and its massive tax booty. And I’ll bet Panzica Construction, Lake Erie Electric and hundreds of government contractors wet their pants thinking about ginormous infrastructure dollars flowing back here to build whatever the federal government decides we should have with the dollars we send them.

There are literally tens of millions of proxy government employees, and they don’t want their ox gored. That’s the REAL swamp. And it’s so deeply entrenched and has been for so long that it doesn’t even know it’s the swamp. It thinks Goldman Sachs is the swamp. Sure, Goldman Sachs and the rest of what some call the “ruling class,” “one percenters,” “globalists” or whatever need to have their wings clipped too. But FAR costlier to the average middle-class private sector taxpayer is the proxy government. The state and local “grant” recipients, and their private contractor and non-profit brethren. That’s the swamp. And of course that incestuous triumvirate of local government, private contractors and non-profits has been working overtime right here in our backyard….

So IMO you can’t shut down CDBG and the thousands of other Federal government grant programs fast enough. That includes the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative too, which Cleveland.com has been bemoaning lately. Instead, if the Great Lakes states want clean lakes, we should just take action to stop dumping stuff in them. DUH!!!! What gives us the right to pollute our lakes and expect the taxpayers of Nebraska and Georgia to clean them up?

But of course we can’t even make a dent in the Federal government proxies. The sheer numbers and momentum are just too daunting. Instead we’ll just continue to fund it with new “money” created from thin-air by the Federal Reserve, which the Treasury will “borrow” and spend to keep the swamp functioning. (“Borrowing” is something done in anticipation of being paid back. Hence the quotes. I probably should have added the TBTF banks to the proxy government swamp troika. Next time I will….)


ryan costa
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby ryan costa » Sat May 27, 2017 10:55 am

The EPA, and to some extent OSHA,...and whatever law enforcement branches are empowered to enforce on the Clean Water Act are generally in charge regulating what gets dumped into rivers and lakes.

of course, most rain ends up in a river or stream eventually, and then a lake. so it will wash whatever pesticides and fertilizers and land fill spillover is available into the lake.


"shall we have peace" - Henry Charles Carey
Tim Liston
Posts: 751
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:10 pm

Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby Tim Liston » Wed Aug 23, 2017 10:36 am

An older item I tucked away, it seems timely during back-to-school week (which in my time was AFTER Labor Day)….

….the greatest skill that you can have is a thirst for knowledge, loving and learning how to learn because things are going to be changing so dramatically over the next ten years in terms of technology that we don’t know what the best jobs are going to be. So we’re all going to have to continue to learn how to find new skills.”

-Mark Cuban, (March 31, 2017 during an interview with Alex Marlowe, click here for a recap though I heard much of it live in the car at the time)

Mark Cuban may be the luckiest guy on the planet. He founded a very ordinary Internet company back in the 90’s and (here’s the lucky part) sold it for billions just before it, like so many others, went bust. Among other things he’s now the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks. He’s somewhat of a maverick himself, with political aspirations, but he’s kind of hard to cubbyhole. Mark is quite the free-thinker. Ideologues will find some of his positions very favorable and others very unfavorable. He was a lukewarm Hillary supporter but had previously offered Obama $5 million to release his college transcripts. I wish he’d make me the same offer....

As the father of two offspring who attended Montessori / International Baccalaureate schools from K through 12, Cuban’s comment above resonates with me. The times we now live in are very unpredictable, putting educational resilience at a big premium. And if learning and re-learning are a chore, well, you’re pretty much destined to a less than fulfilling work life. Though I would not refer to a thirst for knowledge and a love of learning as “skills” as Cuban did. I’d call them “traits.” And traits are established at a VERY young age, certainly long before high school. Closer to pre-K….

There’s a whole cohort of “rules-based” professions and other occupations that may find themselves in significant decline in ten years: accounting, finance, some areas of medicine. The legal profession is free-falling even as it continues to create its own demand. AI is getting very powerful. Heck I’m in the business of replacing bankers with software that routinizes very complex rules-based lending processes. The people with the jobs are developing and supporting the software (that’s me). Traditional loan originators and processors are losing their jobs, and need to find new employment, undoubtedly in a different field. Hopefully they have the resilience and wherewithal to do so. Appraisal is being similarly automated, both Fannie and Freddie now buy some loans without appraisals.

You young parents need to pay very close attention to your young children. You can’t offload parenting to grandparents or a nanny. If you want to impart the traits needed to navigate the world in the decades to come, you need to take a very active and very purposeful role in child-rearing. And yes, you need to understand the pluses and minuses of your child's schooling. One thing for sure, most schools these days (at best) are not much help. Traditional schools and many of our university programs excel at churning out a “product” well-prepared for last century’s challenges. Augmenting schooling with quality parental involvement and great extracurricular experiences will go a long way toward building the educational resilience that Cuban promotes....


ryan costa
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Re: Quote of the Day....

Postby ryan costa » Sat Aug 26, 2017 10:37 am

I think the next big thing in AI will be robotic customers. They can order more cheeseburgers, and eat them faster.


"shall we have peace" - Henry Charles Carey

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