Hard Truths to Muddle Through Tough Times

Here are today's quotes. Once again, there seems to be an underlying theme of impending doom. Perhaps that's a bit of an extreme take—or perhaps not.

Yaounde, Cameroon - no real connection to the content here. I just liked the photo and wanted to share.

1. Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder
   "When people escape an impoverished background, they, too, are gone forever in a sense. Even if they return, they think differently, speak differently, and even eat differently. A family member once told me she didn’t want to set up education funds for her children because people came back from college as atheists. And what good is increased earnings potential when compared to eternal damnation?"
   Goodreads

2. Stuart Brown, M.D. & Christopher Vaughan, Play
   "When we stop playing, we stop developing, and when that happens, the laws of entropy take over—things fall apart. Ultimately, we share the fate of the sea squirt and become vegetative, staying in one spot, not fully interacting with the world, more plant than animal. When we stop playing, we start dying."
   Goodreads

3. Li Yuan, China’s Police Are Preying on Small Firms in Search of Cash
   "The money grabs are a sign of just how financially desperate local governments are. The country’s housing market has unraveled. Income from land sales, which used to make up about a third of local government revenue, fell by nearly one-third last year from the peak in 2021, according to the finance ministry."
   The New York Times

4. Washington Post, What Canada’s Carbon Pricing Ruling Says About the Global Struggle Against Climate Change
   "Climate action is rife with problems—from free riders to dissenting ideology, to science denialism, to domineering capital interests, and beyond." (i.e., it is a wicked problem)
   Washington Post

5. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen
   "On one issue, the strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain."
   Goodreads

Quotes for December 8 - 2024

 Good morning all - I hope you are finding this Sunday morning a good one where you find yourself.

Here is a subset of the quote that showed in my Readwise feed this morning.

Quotes for today, Sunday (not Sundae), December 8th

"For most of the history of Western political thought, writers focused on demagoguery only in the context of arguing that democracy was a poor form of government. Aristocratic critics such as Thucydides and Plato blamed popular leaders for dismissing experts, exploiting the poor and soaking the rich, sparking factional violence, and starting foreign wars to distract the populace from their tyrannical tendencies."
–nytimes.com, Opinion | How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump

"For me, if you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback."
–Brené  Brown, Rising Strong

"If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy."
–foreignaffairs.com, China’s Coming Upheaval

Systems Quotes

"A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior."
–Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

"A shadow network is not active all the time and so does not have maintenance costs, but it can be quickly brought into play without the normal period of trust building required for a network to operate."
–Brian Walker, David Salt, Resilience Practice

"An analysis of global governance in Science (Walker et al. 2009) found that the global institutions that do exist tend to address the concerns they were set up to deal with largely in a silo fashion."
–Brian Walker, David Salt, Resilience Practice