MarkFord
What’s with those millennials? You may have seen this before. I have. But I enjoyed watching it a second time.
A Beautiful Concept Called Transactive Memory
I found this on page 67 of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia:
“The psychologist Daniel Wagner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love.
“You don’t need to remember your child’s relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because your daughter will.
“That’s transactive memory. Little bits of our memory reside in other people’s minds. Wagner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will say after the other member dies – that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wagner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.”
Hunter Biden’s Missing Laptop: It Wasn’t a Hoax
After three years of the New York Post and Fox News reporting on it, and the NYT and CNN (et al.) debunking it, the truth is out. On Mar. 17, the Times quietly acknowledged that it has been wrong. The story of Hunter Biden’s laptop – with all its incriminating evidence – was not a “conspiracy theory.”
The contents of the laptop show that, during the time his father was vice president, Hunter and his uncle James were receiving millions of dollars from foreign countries. For example:
* The Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy paid Hunter $6 million for “consulting” and “legal” fees, and another $1 million for finding a US lawyer to defend Patrick Ho, a Chinese spy.
* The Bidens also received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the widow of Russian oligarch Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow.
Other deals were done in Qatar, Russia, and Ukraine.
The story originally broke on Oct. 14, 2020, when the Post ran a front-page story, detailing how emails from the laptop tied Hunter and his father to Ukrainian business partners.
It was dismissed as fake news by the mainstream media, social media, and even some US intelligence officials. You may remember the big ad placed in the NYT by 50 former intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan and James Clapper, calling the laptop story “Russian disinformation.” You may also remember that Twitter deplatformed the Post for two weeks.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly denied any knowledge of or connection to Hunter’s overseas business. During the second presidential debate, he claimed that stories about his son’s laptop were “a Russian plant.”
After the NYT admitted that there was indeed a real story here, The Washington Post followed suit. And since then, facts have been gradually coming to light.
Click here.
If You Want to Develop a Big, Sustainable Business…
You Must Become Knowledgeable in Two Ways
In business, as, in life, there are two kinds of knowledge: specific and general.
Specific knowledge pertains to the hundreds of particular things you need to understand to run your business – from how to place advertisements to how to process orders to the financial, operational, and management details that must be done to get things done.
General knowledge pertains to things like how to find and groom great employees, how to develop longstanding relationships with vendors, how to come up with new marketing ideas, how to boost company morale, etc.
Growing a business requires both kinds of knowledge. You need industry-specific knowledge to make the dozens of smaller decisions that arise every day. But you also need general knowledge to guide you in the bigger, longer-term decisions.
Young entrepreneurs, because they are young, have only a modicum of general knowledge. But they can – and the successful ones do – have a great deal of specific knowledge. Particularly the specifics about marketing and sales.
But as the business grows and layers of management are added, it becomes impossible for the founder/entrepreneur/CEO to have all the industry-specific knowledge he needs to run it. He must delegate it to people that he trusts.
And that is where general business knowledge comes into play. Delegating is easy. Trusting can be, too. But unless the CEO has a good deal of general knowledge, his trust will be blind. And his ability to lead his key executives will be nil.
About the Gumbo-Limbo Tree
This is a photo of a Gumbo-Limbo tree. It’s one of my favorite deciduous trees that we have at Paradise Palms.
* It is a large semi-evergreen. The leaves are bright green and the flowers are creamy white.
* Its scientific name is Bursera simaruba. It is native to tropical regions of the Americas, from South Florida to Mexico and the Caribbean.
* It has a lifespan of 100 years.
* It grows quickly – 6 to 8 feet from a seed in just 18 months – and can reach 40 to 50 feet.
* It is a habitat for many resident and migrant species of birds, as well as monkeys and squirrels that feed on its red berries.
* Its wood is suitable for light construction and firewood, and its resin is used for glue, varnish, and incense.
* It is often referred to as the “tourist tree” because the bark is red and peeling, like the skin of a sunburnt tourist.
San José, Costa Rica
Other than passing through on my way to Nicaragua, I’ve been to San José only once – on a short business trip. My impression was, “Boy, this is an interesting city. I’ve got to get back here with K one day.” I’ve read a bit about it since and talked to people that have lived there. Here are some of the sites we’ll be checking out when we go:
* Avenida Central, a walking street that goes right through the core of the downtown
* Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica
* The mysterious stone spheres, dating back to 200 BC
* The Pre-Columbian Gold Museum and the Jade Museum
* The view from the bar at Gran Hotel
“Dreaming about being rich is fun. But the only thing you’ll get from it is the enjoyment of the dreaming. Wanting to be rich – that’s another thing entirely. Wanting, without doing, is a waste of time. So, if you like dreaming, dream on. But if you want to actually be rich, stop dreaming and start working. Harder than your wanting self wants to work.” – Michael Masterson
Ploce (PLOH-chay), from the Ancient Greek for “weaving” or “braiding,” is a rhetorical device – the repetition or inversion of a word or phrase for emphasis. Examples:
* “I am stuck on Band-Aid, and Band-Aid’s stuck on me.”
* “I am what I am.”
* “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
Everything you thought you knew about addiction is wrong. That’s what Johann Hari says in this TED Talk. I don’t see his theory as the final word, but it does point out the flaws in conventional thinking on the subject. And I’m always in favor of refuting conventional thinking.
This week’s book?
Aha! It was sitting on my desk – a gift from a reader: Soonish, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. The gift card read, “From a top scientist and the creator of the hugely popular webcomic ‘Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,’ an illustrated investigation into future technologies.”
It was 368 pages. It had a snappy subtitle: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. And it was illustrated!
What’s not to like?
Needless to say, I read it immediately…