Jan 022013
 
  1. Don’t mistake your vocation (i.e. choose a profession you enjoy).
  2. Select the right location (i.e where you can realistically engage in your profession).
  3. Avoid debt.
  4. Persevere.
  5. Whatever you do, do it with all your might.
  6. Depend upon your own personal exertions (i.e. learn your profession).
  7. Use the best tools.
  8. Don’t get above your business (i.e. don’t be above doing the hands-on labor).
  9. Learn something useful (i.e have a trade or skill to fall back on).
  10. Let hope predominate. But be not too visionary (i.e. don’t automatically believe every project will succeed).
  11. Do not scatter your powers (i.e. don’t be a “jack-of-all-trades” and focus on one profession).
  12. Be systematic (i.e set times and places for your work, be organized and punctual, do one thing at a time).
  13. Read the newspapers.
  14. Beware of “outside” operations (i.e. spending speculative venture capital on risky, unknown operations and companies).
  15. Don’t endorse without security (i.e. don’t give away/invest money in someone or something, even if you feel safe about it, without some security to protect yourself).
  16. Advertise your business.
  17. Be polite and kind to your customers.
  18. Be charitable.
  19. Don’t blab (i.e. say nothing of your internal operations to others).
  20. Preserve your integrity (i.e. your integrity far outweighs profits so come by profits honestly).

from The Art of Money Getting (1880)

Nov 222012
 

“This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory and two useless but true theorems are proved.”

“Is space the Final Frontier of economics? Certainly this is only a first probe of the subject, but the possibilities are surely limitless. (In curved space-time, of course, this does not prevent the possibilities from being finite as well!). I have not even touched on the fascinating possibilities of interstellar finance, where spot and forward exchange markets will have to be supplemented by conditional present markets. Those of us working in this field are still a small band, but we know that the Force is with us.”

[www.princeton.edu]

Jul 092012
 

“In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs. “Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.”

From CABINET magazine, Spring 2012 // Heavy Breeding.

Jun 272012
 

“It’s not because people have suddenly started reading Marx or a new generation of leftists has spontaneously emerged. It’s that crisis always makes a system visible. It always makes its limits visible. And systems don’t normally like that, and therefore people are able to cast a new critical eye on them.”

The Oxonian Review » An Interview with Terry Eagleton