Links - 6/4/2020
“The business of being scared, I don’t know what you do about that. If you have a temperament that when others are fearful, you’re going to get scared yourself, you are not going to make a lot of money in securities over time, in all probability.” —Warren Buffett (2010)
“To expect somebody else to tell you when to buy and therefore get your courage back up or something—you know, I could get this fellow’s courage up substantially by saying this is a wonderful time to buy, and then a week from now he’d run into somebody else that tells him the world is coming to an end and he’d sell. I mean, he’s a broker’s friend, but he’s not going to make a lot of money…. There’s a lot of interest in investing, and people are going to yak about it all the time. And in the end, what counts is buying a good business at a decent price, and then forgetting about it for a long, long, long time. And some people can do it and some people can’t.” —Warren Buffett (2010)
The GMO Quarterly Letter featuring Ben Inker and Jeremy Grantham (LINK)
Commentary: What US business post-COVID can learn from shipping post-2008 (LINK)
The Endangered Asian Century: America, China, and the Perils of Confrontation - by Lee Hsien Loong (LINK)
This Is the Strangest Economy Ever - by Derek Thompson (LINK)
Freakonomics Radio (podcast): 420. Which Jobs Will Come Back, and When? (LINK)
Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: Yield curve, under control? (LINK)
Infinite Loops Podcast: Eric Jorgenson: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (LINK)
a16z Podcast: What We Can’t Reveal We Can’t Heal (LINK)
Village Global's Venture Stories Podcast: Unbundling Journalism with Chris Best of Substack (LINK)
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: 65 - Supernova in the East IV (LINK)
The Pomp Podcast: 308: Matt Ridley On Rationalism & Innovation In The Current Environment (Audio, Video)
Related book: How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Discrimination and Disparities with Thomas Sowell (2018 video) (LINK)
Related book: Discrimination and Disparities
William James: in praise of the Irish goodbye (LINK)
This Is Why You Have To Care - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)
COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months - by Ed Yong (LINK)
“So much of the bad behavior does not come from malevolence or overweening greed or anything like that. It comes from subconscious poor cognition that justifies a lot of behavior that’s really not justifiable if it’s better understood. And that happens to practically everybody. And the cure is very difficult. The best cure is to have a system where the people who are making the decisions bear the consequences. And that’s why the system that Wall Street created where nobody really owned the mortgages, they just passed them rapidly to somebody else at a profit—and so nobody felt any responsibility that the mortgages be any good. Systems like that, at a basic level, are irresponsible systems, and it’s deeply immoral to create irresponsible systems like that. But the people who create them don’t realize they’re being immoral. They think those systems are wonderful.” —Charlie Munger (2010)