Radical Markets/Trim/Deal with difficult emotions
Recomendo: issue no. 118
Alternative economic ideas
Crazy ideas sometimes become everyday and obvious. No book I’ve read has had more crazy economic ideas than Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. Their ideas — which rethink the idea of property and taxes — are intriguing, and even if wrong, might be productively wrong. It is dense reading, but exhilarating. — KK
Hire a negotiator to lower your bills
Trim is an online service that negotiates with your phone, cable TV, and Internet providers to reduce your monthly bill by asking for a discount. Sure, I could do this myself, but I’m happy to pay someone else a 33% commission on the money they save me. So far they’ve successfully reduced my annual bills by $543.24. — MF
How to deal with difficult emotions
Practicing mindfulness is easier said than done. This chart breaks it down into six easy steps to make sense of your difficult emotions. I find that visualizing my emotion as a little tangled mess that lives outside of my body makes it less likely I will react impulsively. — CD
Cooperative tabletop game
Most board games have a winner and a bunch of losers. But there are a number of games where users must work with each other to achieve a goal. One of the best is cooperative games is Forbidden Island ($18). The goal of this attractively designed card and token game is to recover four life-saving treasures from an island before it sinks into the ocean, drowning all the players. Achieving victory requires players to formulate plans, agree on strategies, and make sacrifices. — MF
Inspiring livelihood documentary
Shorebreak is a fast 60 minute doc on Amazon Prime about this surfer who found a special niche in photography. His thing is standing at the scary point where giant waves break onto the beach while he photographs whatever crazy surfers are in the wave, before he ducks under the pummeling mountain. The doc is well done, his photography is stunning. But what I love is the lesson of focus, enthusiasm, mastery, and foolish individualization. His relentless enthusiasm, going back to the shorebreak day after day to see if he could make something new again and again, has improbably earned him a living doing this. What a treat! — KK
Quotables
Below are some enlightening things I’ve read lately. — CD
“Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.” — Rupi Kaur
“When you say something unkind, when you do something in retaliation, your anger increases. You make the other person suffer, and they try hard to say or do something back to make you suffer, and get relief from their suffering. That is how conflict escalates.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Taming the Tiger Within
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” — Isaac Asimov
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” — Henry David Thoreau
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski
10/28/18
