This was a very interesting book about how the mortgage backed security and credit default swaps. These methods of banking and investing were very interesting and made these huge webs of reliance. Once one part of the web broke all the others were start breaking. The idea behind these monetary devices was that if you create something and make it seem secure, but then let people know that it may not be as secure as it looks at first in the small print, you can sell it for much more than it will eventually be worth and externalize that risk. If the buyers of these items had just been people there wouldn’t have been a banking crisis, it would have just hit all the wealthy individuals that had bought them and all the people who had taken loans they couldn’t possibly pay back. This would have meant that no bailout would have occurred. Somewhere along the line the banks and investment firms thought that these investments were a great idea and that they were missing out on the money. Once that happened the market became larger and the interdependencies started to accrue. Then the monetary devices started to wilt and all hell broke loose. This makes me think that if you can create a monetary device that seems stable on the surface but is really just a front for a lot of unstable things that you can make an insane amount of money.
This book had a lot of good points on how to foster leadership, hard work, and efficiency. They talk about how the company makes it every persons job to be in charge of their station, and then makes it important for them to know all the things about the line. It stresses that building leadership and efficient, happy work are an ongoing process. Having the ongoing process where everyone has the authority point out better ways of doing things can make the company great.
The book has a lot of interesting information about how the first world environment, specifically that in America is causing boys to become emasculated, slothful, and distracted. He claims that the major factors influencing this are: endocrine disruptors, video games, stimulants for ADHD, teaching methods, and devaluation of masculinity. I agree with most of these, and see how some of them have impacted me, and those that I know. The focus of the book is the impact on men, but I think it can be said that the impact reaches to many women as well. I know a good number of women who fall into the same category, the big difference being that they aren’t necessarily expected to make something of themselves, and being a housewife is sufficient. I think housewives can be hard working and full jobs, like the way my mother approached it, but I see that as not being the norm.
Most of the books I’ve been reading recently on being great involve inspiring others. That is the core focus of this book, and describes well how to go about starting to inspire. The key that this book puts forth is give people a large goal of “Why.” When people have the “Why” then they can work towards the goals of the group without having to constantly ask the group if things are ok or not.
This was a nice and short overview of where skepticism and religious relativism come from and what the basic ideas behind them are. It doesn’t get in depth about it but give a lot of points to look into things further.
This book had a lot of great advice about how to inspire the people you work with and get them to realize their potential. I noticed how the leaders around me were like the leaders they mentioned in the book and how some of them were not like the leaders mentioned. I would like to think that I could use the methods applied in the book, but I tend to Blake getting my hands dirty. I’ll try as much as I can to inspire the people around me.
This was interestIng history of the discovery of the atom and all the intermediate steps along the way. They went into a lot of the personal and political relationships of the physicists. These were all very interesting, especially around how stubborn some of them got around their ideas being correct. There was also a good bit of peer pressure from the ‘best’ physicists on the less great ones. It is amazing what lengths they all went through to prove very small ideas. I was also amazed at the semantics that they argued about with the particle wave duality of matter.
This book was very interesting, and had a lot of great general advice for starting up small companies. The end of the book was a really strange alternate reality, multiuniverse, what-if scenario of if space was more salient. The story was kinda long for the points it was trying to make, but I agree with a lot of the message. It was saying that we were sacrificing functionality for entertainment with consideration of the space race. Nasa was spending tons of money putting people in orbit, when it could be spending fractions of that money to build massive satellite networks. The book also talked about the KISS maxim that I try to prescribe to, Keep it Simple and Salient. Most of the time it is read as Keep it Simple Stupid, but I like the Salient version better.
This was an incredibly boring and tedious listen, and I didn’t pay good attention through most of it. I expect no other part of the bible to be quite as bad as these two books. The laws are very specific and some of them are downright strange, but I can see how they came about with the technology of the time. They wouldn’t have said that if the house is filled with mildew that you should bleach it and keep it dry.
It's an Exciting World 