What is your favorite tool? Is it so familiar or compelling that you are tempted to employ it in all contexts? The law of the instrument illustrates this tendency.
Tag: scarcity
The Trouble with Abundance
Humans aren’t evolved to have or handle abundance. Our nature has a very hard time dealing with abundance. Our abilities, desires, motivations, tools, and everything about us were forged in an evolutionary history of extreme scarcity. What we are evolved for is the journey of survival in the face of scarcity, not the destination of contentment in the face of abundance.
Removing Failure is a Recipe for Disaster
Remember the scene in “The Dark Knight Rises” where Bruce Wayne is trying to escape from a hole in the ground prison? He can’t make the jump as long as the safety harness is tied around him. He’s only capable of his full physical prowess when death is a real alternative. Like it or not, that’s the way it works.
Taking the “Digital” out of “Digital Gold”
The idea of digital gold is to take all the amazing attributes of gold and add the one thing it’s missing: portability. That’s what the “digital” part means. The magic of bitcoin is that it found a way to maintain all the very best properties of money found in gold and add to them the greatest portability of any money in existence with instant, near free global transactions.
Research the Past, Predict the Future
Past data can be a useful item in the toolkit. But the theories that explain it can’t automatically be applied to the future. The data is the effect, and what changes in the future are causes. Will yesterday’s causes hold tomorrow?
Becoming a Master of the Time-Scarcity Demon
We want to exercise, eat well, meditate, learn something cool, travel, go out with friends, spend time in solitude, go for hikes, read a million books, take care of finances and errands, keep up with podcasts and news and interesting online content and our loved ones on social networks and fascinating people on social media, while finding space for contemplation and quiet.
Trading Places
“What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” –Henry George When Donald Trump can propose tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, washing machines, and solar-panels without being roundly booed off the stage, one has to wonder if reason has any…
God and the Devil in Policies and Hacks
Individuals who advocate welfarism and redistribution are angry at god. Individuals who chase get rich quick schemes are enamored by the devil. I don’t say that lightly.
Relax, Everything Doesn’t Need to be Easy
Most things, from the simple to the complex, require an increase in the expenditure of time, energy, and effort when you make the shift from merely talking about them to actually doing them. This simple and widespread fact has never been a sufficient reason for failing to engage in constructive action.
The Wonder of the Hard Fork
Bitcoin split into two different versions back in August, after years of debate between insider experts, outsider novices, businesses, hobbyists, tech-types, ideological types, investor types, and everyone else you can imagine.