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Keep the Aspidistra Flying
George Orwell
I cannot recommend this novel enough (particularly to you Blake!). Gordon Comstock, a poet in his late 20s, declares war on money and struggles to keep his lover, happiness, and creativity without selling his soul.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
My cousin Bethany, who’s been awesome long before she gave me a place to stay in NY, bestowed upon me a copy of George Orwell’s somewhat autobiographical Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and it is phenomenal. Some quotes from the first two chapters:
“He couldn’t cope with rhymes and adjectives. You can’t, with only twopence halfpenny in your pocket.”
“For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer,’ and he couldn’t even ‘write’!”
“That noxious, horn-spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.”
“If we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash?”
“Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work.”
“Only five minutes ago his poem had still seemed to him a living thing; now he knew it unmistakably for the worthless tripe that it was. With a kind of nervous disgust he bundled the scattered sheets together, stacked them in an untidy heap and dumbed them on the other side of the table, under the aspidistra. He could not even bear to look at them any longer.”
In the hours I haven’t been aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan, getting caught in the snow and freezing my hands and ears to sterility, it’s touched my soul — a nice break from all that non-fiction I dirty myself with.
Again, I’ve only gotten past the first two chapters of the novel, but I’m fairly certain the aspidistra is a symbol for dreams. Pretty sweet stuff.
Friedrich Nietzsche (via cavum)
This.
(via jenilak)
(via berserkfuck)
Shitty audio quality, but sooooo worth it.
The Entrepreneurial Investor
The guys at West Coast Asset Management
Sound investment strategy is simple: invest in companies you understand, and stick to your ABCs — buy Assets for a Bargain with an expected Catalyst.
A lot of the stuff these guys talk about is fairly basic, even though a lot of people choose to ignore it. Like read and understand a company’s financial statements before you invest. And start with the footnotes. There’s no such thing as one cockroach, so if you find something particularly fishy, maybe just stay out.
Some of their insights were more controversial (in the world of economics), like how efficient markets theory (EMT) is kinda bunk. It goes like this: when you invest in a company you’re trying to beat the market — you’re betting that the company you’re investing in is currently undervalued by the market. But EMT states that at any given moment, the market has incorporated all information about every company into that company’s share price. So you can’t beat it, short of illegal insider information.
But the guys at West Coast Asset Management say that EMT has got it all wrong. EMT, like much micro and macroeconomic theory, is a model of understanding. Yogi Berra puts it best: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” The market is chock-full of opportunities to take advantage of. That’s the beauty of it — people are not perfectly rational beings. The constructs created by people, i.e. the stock market, do not operate with predictable rhyme and reason. In short, EMT assumes everyone is a perfectly rational actor, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that that’s quite an assumption.
So the market is rife with opportunities for profit. Media hype inflates and deflates prices as the mob chases the latest buzz (*cough cough* Facebook *cough cough*), giving cool-headed investors plenty of edge.
And besides, if you know how to minimize your losses and maximize your gains, you can afford a hit-miss ratio of less than 1:1. It’s like blackjack. Play perfectly and your odds are just below 50%. But if you know when to cut your losses and when to cash out, you can make money pretty consistently. Speaking of which, I have a trip to the casino to arrange… and a contentious email about Efficient Market Theory to send to my old Econ2 professor…
Till next time folks. Right now I’m getting into William Blum’s Rogue State, as a refresher on how fucked up this country’s foreign policy has been, still is, and likely will be. But so much of it is essentially review for me, it doesn’t deserve too much attention — I’ll speed-read that shit before next Tuesday.
How Big Is the US Debt?
$65 trillion. That’s more than Earth’s total GDP.
Also, I enjoyed the Social Security and Medicare jabs, those are some seriously fucked up and unsustainable programs — at this rate, anyways. They need more than funding, they need reform.
What I love about the LIBOR scandal:
It’s more proof that conspiracies actually do happen.
People at the top have each other’s emails and phone numbers. They talk to each other. And they strike deals.
The LIBOR, a benchmark for interest rates around the world, is determined by surveying 16 banks on what they think the LIBOR should be, throwing out the 4 highest and the 4 lowest, and averaging the estimates in the middle. It’s determined this way every day.
To rig it, you need pretty much all 16 banks in on it.
Literally the definition of an international banking conspiracy.
(via randomactsofchaos)
Aerosmith has made more money from Guitar Hero than from album sales.
Too good not to reblog.
Forbes: City of Oakland will stop doing business with Goldman Sachs, citing unethical practices with investments.
Bitchin
A billionaire, a Monsanto executive, and a Congressman walk into a bar.
The bartender says “Hey mister, what’ll it be?”
OH
MY
GOD
Praise Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Gustavo Fring, may he rest in peace, amen.
This show makes me feel how I imagine religious people feel.
(via dragonwantsabite)
In my econ2 class
iClicker question: Why accept fiat money?
Answer: Because others will.
The overwhelming confused uproar from the class was shocking — and made me feel pretty G, haha.
“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
So it goes.
