Shane Parrish: “The biggest generator of long-term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. If you let excuses or emotion drive behavior, you’re cheating your future self. Put aside the excuses and start doing what you need to do.”
NYT: “Awe can mean many things. It can be witnessing a total solar eclipse. Or seeing your child take her first steps. Or hearing Lizzo perform live. But, while many of us know it when we feel it, awe is not easy to define. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s vast, yes. But awe is also simpler than we think — and accessible to everyone, he writes in his book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.”…In his book, Dr. Keltner writes that awe is critical to our well-being — just like joy, contentment and love. His research suggests it has tremendous health benefits that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.”
Economist: “Hydrogen has seen previous false dawns. Two decades ago European and Japanese carmakers wasted billions chasing the dream of fuel-cell passenger cars. But governments and investors are betting that this time will be different. One reason is growing interest in using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries, such as steel-making. That would help reduce carbon emissions—and could also boost energy security by reducing dependency on natural gas, the price of which has soared in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Environmentalists love that “green” hydrogen can be made with renewable energy in electrolysers—devices that use electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. This has sparked a global rush to manufacture them, with around 600 proposed projects, about half of them in Europe. But Big Oil is keen on hydrogen too, because “blue” hydrogen can be made in a cleanish way from natural gas, if methane leaks are minimised and resulting carbon emissions are captured and sequestered.”
Niall Ferguson: “The US today is in some ways in the situation of the British Empire in the 1930s. If it repeats the mistakes successive UK governments made in that decade, a fiscally overstretched America will fail to deter a nascent Axis-like combination of Russia, Iran and China from risking simultaneous conflict in three theaters: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. The difference is that there will be no sympathetic industrial power to serve as the “arsenal of democracy” — a phrase used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a radio broadcast on Dec. 29, 1940. This time it is the autocracies that have the arsenal.”
: “It should not be difficult to understand that if a firm is prevented from realizing excess profits when the price of its product rises unexpectedly, while it will have to support excess losses when the price drops below expectations, its owners will not incur costs to make sure it has enough productive capacity to profit from a possible future emergency. So why is the government of the European Union imposing an excess-profit tax on European energy producers following the Russian supply cuts?…The reason instead is that political processes and especially democratic processes are myopic, biased toward the short term and often the very short term. The typical politician may not be in power when the detrimental consequences may be recognized years from now—while, on the other hand, they are strongly pressured to do something now, anything, and especially with somebody else’s money. Government bureaucrats are sure to get their salaries and pensions whatever happens, short of widespread destruction of capital or a revolution. The typical voter has no incentive to spend time and other resources on getting and analyzing information on public policy since his individual vote will not change anything in a collective choice; and even if he made inordinate efforts to understand, he would have to cast his single vote on bundles of complex measures whose intricate and interrelated consequences are typically impossible to forecast.”
