A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Our first notebook comes from Nat Bennett, from whom I got the following quote, which is today's Quote of the Day in my planner: There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done." At the link above, he describes how he goes about acquiring such a desirable reputation in a post called, "Why You Need a WTF Notebook." The notebook of which he speaks helps him keep track of problems he notices upon joining a team, which he simply collects as he becomes acclimated and better able to figure out whi ..read more

Occasionally, I run into advice I wish I'd encountered years before, and a Forbes piece titled "5 Ways To Work Effectively With Someone You Really Don't Like" would certainly fit that description. Interestingly for this one, wishing I'd encountered the advice and whether I would have profited much from it at the time are two different matters. For example, as the first person from my lower middle class family to attend college, there was a lot I didn't know about regarding professional norms because, on top of being very introverted, I simply hadn't been exposed very much to those norms: And ..read more

Via the Harry Binswanger Letter, I learned of a fantastic editorial from the British press regarding the situation in Iran and what the West ought to do. In "Iran Is About to Start a Nuclear World War -- and the West Is Determined to Lose," Allister Heath makes the following statement, which would have been obvious decades ago, but is controversial today: I agree that the West should take care of Iran's military while the Iranians deal with this guy and his buddies. (Image modified from image at Wikimedia Commons, license.) If Joe Biden were a serious president, he would announce th ..read more

During a walk, I was trying to listen to the Yaron Brook Show, but was having a hard time between the constant wind and the volume being low on that episode. I could make out bits and pieces, but was mostly frustrated. Fortunately, one of the bits I could make out was a rather topical recommendation: Listen to Leonard Peikoff's Ford Hall Forum lecture (embedded below), "A Philosopher Looks at the O. J. Verdict." Correctly hoping it would be loud enough to hear over the wind, I took him up on the idea. I had just started grad school during this trial, and I recall some very strange conversa ..read more

Since he became speaker based solely on his loyalty to Trump -- a man who would throw his own mother under the bus on a whim -- I had an extremely low estimate of Speaker Mike Johnson. After he ignored such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene to pass a military aid package, that estimate is slightly higher: He would seem possessed of enough low cunning or even common sense to know when and how to work with political opponents to achieve a goal. Writing at UnHerd, Fred Bauer outlines the ways the other Trump loyalists (who are now calling for Johnson's head) screwed themselves by preemptivel ..read more

Jerry Liu offers the following advice, which fellow role-playing gamers will find easy to translate into real-life terms and quite memorable: Use your potions and scrolls. He opens with a familiar scenario: I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What's the point, then, of all these items? The answer to his last question arrives from an experiment that it's probably fair to say ..read more

Over at Reason, John Stossel notes that "The Labor Department just imposed 300 pages of new regulations to reclassify many individual contractors as payroll employees." Great. I guess that's why our tax preparer had all sorts of questions about gig work for us this year. Naturally, news media uncritically parrot the administration's alleged justifications for the changes, despite the fact that, as Stossel reminds us, this terrible idea has already been tried and failed in California: Four years ago, unions got then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D -- San Diego) to push through a new law that ..read more

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse. I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information. The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late. At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most milita ..read more

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. According to New ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute is promoting a booklet titled Finding Morality and Happiness Without God, and quotes author Onkar Ghate: The basic reason religion remains such an esteemed aspect of American society is that it is considered important, even indispensable, to morality. The strongest form this idea takes is that morality depends on religion -- that without God, the distinction between good and evil loses meaning, and anything goes. Mentioning happiness in the title should intrigue the more active-minded: Thanks to religion, most people associ ..read more

This morning, I read about two disasters, one natural and one man-made, that happened yesterday in Louisiana. Debris lines show the extent of the flooding. The faint uppermost line is less than a foot below doorstep level. (Image by the author, copying permitted.) The former took the form of a nasty storm that not only spawned a tornado that touched down northeast of New Orleans, but also dumped over half a foot of rain within a couple of hours. Fortunately for us, our neighborhood got just the rain. We have a very effective drainage system here, but we're on flat land and the rate ..read more