Autobiographical Corner
A first in my life: I removed a tree stump. Actually, three tree stumps, but two were rooted together and came out as one.
They'd been in my backyard for 15 years, tacitly taunting me, mocking my virility. I resolved to take them out. A friend loaned me his maul. I left work early yesterday to get started. My plan: dig around the complex of roots, exposing them to the elements for a couple of days (heavy rain in the forecast). I would then soak them in kerosene Friday morning, light them on fire when I got back from the office late Friday afternoon, then hack up the stumps all day Saturday.
But when I dug around the roots on the first pair of stumps, the whole thing started to move. I then got excited and hacked at its roots until I pulled the whole thing up. Adrenaline flowing, I attacked the third stump. It proved far more resilient, but after 90 minutes, I was finally able to yank it out of the ground, using a combination of pulls and jumping on a make-shift lever I made out of three two-by-fours. It was a great feeling, and now I have a lot more room for my garden. Even my wife--who long ago gave up the idea of recovering that prime backyard real estate from the stumps--is excited.
Humility + Uncertainty = Conservative
Why be a conservative, applied to the economics sphere. One of the best quotes of the young year: "Not only does the government not have the kind of control that the public perceives, but no one, not even among the most renowned professors or hedge fund managers, has the analytical powers or knowledge to accurately describe the future, much less how to alter the course of events in this way or that. History is littered with unintended consequences of actions that were meant to achieve some desired goal, but resulted in something entirely different ”“ not necessarily worse, but different. Everyone with any skill in the money management or the economic forecasting arena is aware of how little he or she knows. The random nature of the variables is important, but the psychologically hardwired misconceptions that the behavioral economists have recently pinpointed make the problem much worse." John R. Taylor. Link.
