From the Great Depression through now. 2 separate Economic Transitions. (A Brain Fart started in 2009.) (more)

Michael Cole Jensen (November 30, 1939 – April 2, 2024) was an American economist who worked in the field of financial economics. From 1967 to 1988, he was on the University of Rochester's faculty.[1] Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for the Monitor Company Group,[2] a strategy-consulting firm which became "Monitor Deloitte" in 2013. Until 2000, he held the position of Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_C._Jensen (more)

Milton Friedman (/ˈfriːdmən/ ⓘ; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy.[4] With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics in the mid-1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman (more)

Steve Denning: Why The Pandemic Of Maximizing Shareholder Value Is Still Raging. The last 90 years have seen several missteps on corporate purpose. From the 1930s to the 1970s, corporate managers embraced “stakeholder capitalism.” (See Figure 1.3 above). Executives were expected to optimize among all the stakeholders—customers, staff and partners, shareholders, and society as a whole. The result? Not surprisingly, we saw many “garbage can organizations” emerge. (more)

Understanding the Most Effective Breathwork Techniques with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Even though cyclic sighing proved to be the most effective breathwork (breathing) technique, all three breathing exercises (others were box breathing and Cyclic hyperventilation) were more effective at improving mood and reducing respiratory rates than mindfulness meditation. This is thought to be caused by the enhanced sense of control over one’s breath that’s involved with breathwork. (more)

Laozi (variously spelled; /ˌlaʊ.ˈtsʌ/, low-TSUH; Chinese: 老子; pinyin: Lǎozǐ) was a legendary Chinese philosopher considered to be the author of the Tao Te Ching (Pinyin: Dào Dé Jīng), one of the foundational texts of Taoism. Modern scholarship generally regards his biographical details as later inventions and his opus a collaboration of various writers, with the name Laozi, literally meaning 'Old Master', likely intended to portray an archaic anonymity that could converse with Confucianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi

15 Ways To Stimulate the Vagus Nerve At Home. (more)

Adam Tooze: Breaking down the Big Mac. The economics of American water. The dismembering of Mali & the history of the pocket. (more)

The Colorado River (Spanish: Río Colorado) is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. The 1,450-mile-long (2,330 km) river, the 5th longest in the United States, drains an expansive, arid watershed that encompasses parts of seven U.S. states and two Mexican states. The name Colorado derives from the Spanish language for "colored reddish" due to its heavy silt load. Starting in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, it flows generally southwest across the Colorado Plateau and through the Grand Canyon before reaching Lake Mead on the Arizona–Nevada border, where it turns south toward the international border. After entering Mexico, the Colorado approaches the mostly dry Colorado River Delta at the tip of the Gulf of California between Baja California and Sonora. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River

A megadrought is an exceptionally severe drought, lasting for many years and covering a wide area. There is no exact definition of a megadrought.[2] The term was first used by Connie Woodhouse and Jonathan Overpeck in their 1998 paper, 2000 Years of Drought Variability in the Central United States.[2][3] In this, it referred to two periods of severe drought in the US – one at the end of the 13th century and the other in the middle of the 16th century.[3] The term was then popularised as a similar severe drought affected the Southwestern US from the year 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megadrought (more)

Amid Drought, Billionaires Control A Critical California Water Bank. Water prices are soaring in California’s Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s food is grown. As the West Coast’s megadrought worsens, one farming company has long been scrutinized for its outsize role in the arid region’s water supply. (more)

Motivation Manifesto, 2014 book by Brendan Burchard. (more)

Lazy Man's Way To Riches by Joe Karbo, 1973 (more)

These Four States Are in Denial Over a Looming Water Crisis. Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. (more)

Why the western US is running out of water, in one chart. More than one in 10 Americans rely on the Colorado River to take showers and drink clean water. But with no end in sight to the decades-long drought in the western US and rapidly decreasing river levels, this essential resource is fueling bitter disputes over who, exactly, should be cutting back on water. (more)

When politics dams feedback. Dan Davies’ account of how complex institutions drive decisions and actions while shielding themselves from accountability is a major contribution to public policy analyses. I applaud him for bringing cybernetics back in and for developing a model that surpasses the standard economics approach to information. (more)

How To Save the Colorado River. Snowpack in the mountains provides tap water for millions downstream. That water is also the key ingredient for salads and steak dinners around the country. Melting snow feeds creeks and tributaries that eventually connect with the Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles through seven states, supporting nearly 40 million people, over 4 million acres of farmland, and an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic activity. The river fills sprinklers and faucets from Denver to San Diego and every other major southwest city, town, farm field, and feed lot in between (more)

Colorado River Water Plan Postpones Reckoning With a Drier Future. The US government released a plan on Friday that for now staves off catastrophic cuts to the water supply in Arizona, California and Nevada as the Colorado River climate crisis leaves reservoirs at record lows, threatening a resource supporting 40 million people and more than $1 trillion in gross domestic product (more)

The Colorado River in Crisis. As the population in the Colorado River Basin continues to grow, the demand for water will increase. The water in the Colorado River needs to serve municipal, agricultural, Tribal and recreation needs, and enough water needs to stay in the river for fish and wildlife, including more than 150 species that are at risk. It’s a dire situation with no easy answers. (more)

William David Marx, known professionally as W. David Marx, is an American fashion and culture writer who works and lives in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (2015)[3][4][5] and Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (2022).[6] Marx also publishes a newsletter titled Culture: An Owner's Manual. He previously worked at Google as part of the Asia-Pacific Team in Corporate and Product Communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._David_Marx | https://culture.ghost.io/