Category: Random

From some first hand experience, it seems like paddle boarding in a river flowing at more than 1,000 CFS (Cubic feet per Second) is about my limit.

https://snoflo.org/report/flow/north-carolina/south-fork-catawba-river-at-lowell/

Whenever the topic of stimulus comes up — fiscal or monetary — there are people who argue that it’s pointless because you can’t create wealth simply by printing money out of thin air. This is an understandable intuition for people to have, since one use of money is just to “keep score” of things. If you went to a basketball game for kids, and made each basket count for 10 points instead of two, the scoreboard would be higher, but it wouldn’t mean that the kids were any better at shooting baskets. We’ve all seen currencies of countries (e.g. Venezuela) that added a bunch of zeros to their currency, and those countries are not rich. So from this perspective, no, printing money cannot make a society wealthier.  read more

Source: http://paulgraham.com/genius.html

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I’m going to choose bus ticket collectors. There are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect. They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Because we don’t care enough. What’s the point of spending so much time thinking about old bus tickets? read more