Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Two funny amazon.com book reviews (from “Discover Your Inner Economist“)

Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

This book is one of the worst books I have ever read. I got to about page 3-4.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me.

Tyler Cowen’s last book, Discover Your Inner Economist, promises tips on “using incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting and motiving your dentist.”

Things you will learn:

• The higher country ranks on indexes of domestic corruption, the higher number of unpaid New York City parking tickets reaped by its U.N. diplomats
• As individuals acquire more education, they increase their dislike of “low status” musical genres… Heavy metal and rap are the only two genres where more people polled “Dislike it very much” than merely “Dislike it.”
• A survey of one million high school seniors recorded 70 percent as thinking they are above average in leadership ability; only 2 percent thought they were below average. when it comes to getting along with others, 60 percent of high school students thought they were in the top 10 percent of their peer group. twenty-five percent of the students thought they were in the top 1 percent.
• Ninety-four percent of polled university professors thought there were better than average at their jobs, compared with their colleagues.

I thought the book was decent reading (something along the lines of a Blink, Tipping Point or Freakonomics), but is admittedly slow in some areas. Chapter five (”Look Good at Home, on a Date or While Being Tortured”), offers some valuable advice on getting people to tell the truth (or, more accurately, how to get people to talk and then how you can divine the truth from what they say. It’s quite clever.)

I saw my brother picked up a new book from Borders the other day, so I promptly borrowed it and begin reading. It’s by Timothy Ferriss and called, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. I had heard about the book from my buddy GK, but I’d never gotten around to reading it. Several hours later I had finished the book and become a new man. Well, maybe not, but I was energized and inspired to break out of the 9-5 prison and begin to take charge of my finances. In 320 pages, Tim details his strategy for generating streams of income, simplifying life and focusing on what really matters. Tim talks about “the living dead”– those who work amazingly hard to amass ultimately worthless stuff and about “deferred living” — slaving for 30 years “sav[ing] it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by.” Tim gives practical advice on how to outsource your life, batch related tasks, negotiate telecommuting, and create a nearly self-running business in a niche market. Tim recommends not attending meetings, checking email weekly, not finishing bad things (food, movies, etc), getting a personal assistant, empowering your employees to make most decisions for you and finding a product and selling it online (the fulfillment of the sale is also outsourced.)

If you’ve contemplated a mobile lifestyle, then this book is for you. Don’t spend the next 30 years working with people you don’t like in order to buy things you don’t need. Remember: life is short. Buy the book. Read the book. Then use the info to change your life for the better.

Are you familiar with the classic poem, “This Is Just To Say,” by William Carlos Williams? It goes a something like this:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I first read it in 11th grade English class and I thought back then that it was a pretty silly poem. However, it’s also a fun poem to try to copy stylistically and that’s exactly the context of the book “This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness“, by Joyce Sidman — a sixth grade class wrote poems of apology WC Williams-esque. I think the book is clever and it’s the perfect book to read aloud in small gatherings of friends. Well, gatherings of friends which include  people who appreciate poetry, anyway. I hope Joyce will forgive me for including one of the poems here: To Mrs. Garcia, in the Office:

This Is Just to Say
I have stolen
the jelly doughnuts
that were in the teachers’ lounge

and which you were probably
saving
for teachers

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so gloppy

too bad the powdered sugar
spilled all over my shirt
and gave me away

by Thomas

Carolynn Duncan, who you’ll remember from the $100 mall kiosk experiment, just released an eBook goldmine of entrepreneurial wisdom– not from sheltered academics, but from 70 seasoned, successful small business owners “working in the trenches.” Carolynn has organized their stories into groups of related topics and provided a guidebook and road map for you, the next entrepreneur, to launch and grow your business ideas.

Recently, after my MBA graduation, someone asked me to sum up in a sentence what I had learned. I thought for a moment before replying, “It’s difficult to say what exactly will make a good business — there are uncontrollable factors like timing, serendipity, trends and luck which play significant roles — but it’s easy to list elements that will sink any venture.” Through the experiences in Carolynn’s eBook, The Entrepreneur Story, you’ll vicariously discover many pitfalls to avoid, be inspired by thier tales of determination and be armed with the right questions to ask in each stage of company development. With this wisdom, a little luck, and a lot of action, you, too, can be featured in the next installment of The Entrepreneur Story!

I read the eBook cover to cover and I think it is a valuable tool. Sure, it’s a bit heavy on female-owned businesses (Carolynn happens to be female, so that makes sense) and the authors aren’t always the most eloquent, but the information and inspiration make it well worth the read.

From the book, some of the questions you’ll ask yourself as you contemplate starting your own business include:

• What changes in your life would open up new possibilities for you in the future?
• What critical service can you provide to people/businesses in your area?
• Which current opportunities can you take advantage of?
• What can i make that can be easily copyrighted, replicated and sold?
• Which hobbies do you have, that could possibly turn into a profitable business?
• Who do you know that can help you put your idea into action?

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you working for yourself RIGHT NOW?

Download a 30-page sample with Table of Contents, 3 chapters and more.

Julian Baggini’s latest book, The pig that wants to be eaten, brings together classic thought experiments alongside an ample dose of new dilemmas (several of which I’ve blogged about recently.) In the spirit of full disclosure, Julian is a godless, marginally homophilic, pro-abortion, far-left-leaning, pinko liberal. He’s the type of person that appears on NPR daily. He is also a very good writer and is wickedly clever. He happens to be British, so if you can manage to overlook his talk of “maths”, “queuing up” and “programmes,” you’ll find an abundance of bite-sized, thought provoking moral scenarios, several of which should send your head spinning.

Julian’s dilemmas make great deep conversation starters, so as the temperatures plummet sending us all indoors, grab a few friends, this book and a canister of Stephens Gourmet hot chocolate and let the debates begin!

It has been a long while since my last book review (Why I Write.) So long, that many of you must now assume that I have become illiterate (or at least sworn off reviewing the written word.) I wish to disabuse the public of this wrongful notion. Those who know me will attest I am an avid cereal box reader, for example.

But returning to books, let’s turn the calendar back many hundred years to AD 170. We are in Rome and for the last ten years Marcus Aurelius has been co-ruling the Roman Empire with his buddy, Lucius Aelius Verus. Versus dies and Marcus, now a lone ruler, contemplative and introspective, jots down his Stoic musings in a book he calls “Meditations.” During the next ten years he writes twelve chapters (which he calls “books”) filled with brief observations on life.

Aside: What is with writers calling sections of their books, “books?” That’s confusing. The Book of Mormon, for example, contains itself a Book of Mormon. By Wikipedia rules, we’d need a disambiguation entry for that.

Stoicism, in case you were too lazy to click the link, “teaches that self-control, fortitude and detachment from distracting emotions, sometimes interpreted as an indifference to pleasure or pain, allows one to become a clear thinker, level-headed and unbiased. … Virtue, reason, and natural law are prime directives. By mastering passions and emotions, Stoics believe it is possible to overcome the discord of the outside world and find peace within oneself. Stoicism holds that passion distorts truth, and that the pursuit of truth is virtuous.”

Some quotations from Meditations:

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”

Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong.

Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Christmas ‘05, when my parents asked what I’d like for a gift, as always, I told them that a new book or two would be just fine. Instead, they bought me a Medieval sword and a pair of Chinese daggers, stating “you already have lots of books.”

They were right, technically; I do have a fair number of books, but since when do parents buy their children weapons instead of educational tools? Had I then been a minor, a call to the Child Protection Services would not have been unwarranted.

This past Christmas I repeated my desire for book gifts saying, “I would like books for Christmas, but if you end up buying me a suit of armor or a lance, I guess that would be fine, too.”

Against all odds, my parents held off on the Dark Age armaments and bought me a number of Penguin Classic books. Among my plunder was a bound copy of an essay by George Orwell/Eric Arthur Blair of the Animal Farm fame (”Some pigs lead a revolt against people, act like jerks, and play poker.”)

George’s work is entitled “Why I Write”, but before revealing why he writes, he lists four reasons why anyone would ever write:

1. Sheer egotism

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm

3. Historical impulse

4. Political purpose

George’s reason for writing? Number four (politics) and boy does George have an axe to grind. He uses over twenty pages to excoriate the British, writing for example, “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and the silly.” And of the English politicians he says, “What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.” Literary blood-lust sated, George launches into the main course of his essay; why we should all embrace socialism.

The time was 1941 and the Germans had, in May, begun to heavily bomb London. The English, just a year removed from the myopic command of Neville Chamberlain, were rather unprepared for the assault and were therefore badly suffering. George strongly believed that it was evil capitalism that was preventing England from succeeding in the conflict. “What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism– that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit– does not work.” He goes so far to declare that unless capitalism were immediately replaced by socialism, England was bound to lose the war.

Well, ol’ George was wrong and a short time later, prodded by the Japanese, the bottom-feeding, capitalist Americans arrived and whooped up on the Germans and the other Axis powers. That didn’t stop George from publishing the essay, however, the year after the war, in 1946.

No doubt, many of you will write and ask for a short primer on socialism. Here ya go!

Socialism: “common ownership of the means of production. … the State … owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive good such as land, mines, ships and machinery are the property of the state. … [furthermore there is] approximate equality of incomes…, political democracy and abolition of all hereditary privilege”

Fascism^*: Again, the State “is in control of everything. It controls investment, working hours, wages.” However, “The factory owner stills owns the factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager.”

* Calling someone a Fascist Pig is a good fall back if you run out of other insults in a heated argument.

I wanted to comment on a book I read recently, Blood Diamonds, by Greg Campbell.

In his book, Greg exposes the best kept secret in America — that the lovely engagement rings grooms give their brides fund terror and savage war in Africa and likely aid in terrorism throughout the globe. That the United States, through purchasing a majority of the world’s diamonds (70%) is directly fueling this epidemic conflagration. The masterminds of this fraud? The De Beers Group (the company, not incidentally, plead guilty to price fixing diamonds in the United States in 2004). Here are the facts:

• Starting in 1938 the De Beers company poured money into a amazingly successful “Diamonds are Forever” campaign which convinced a generation that the only acceptable engagement ring was one with a diamond on it.
• Using their monopoly, De Beers keeps prices artificially high by limiting the yearly supply of diamonds into the market.
• Other De Beers’ marketing efforts helped to engrain the “tradition” of spending two to three months salary on a ring

Were those their only sins, the De Beers company would only be culpable of massively hoodwinking the public and monopolistic price fixing of these otherwise worthless shiny rocks. Unfortunately this is not the case. In a 2002 report, Liz Stanton, Center for Popular Economics Staff Economist, lists Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring from Anyone. Among those ten are these few, highlighting the reality of the horrors that is the diamond industry:

• Conflict Diamonds Fund Civil Wars in Africa
• There is no reliable way to insure that your diamond was not mined or stolen by government or rebel military forces in order to finance civil conflict. Conflict diamonds are traded either for guns or for cash to pay and feed soldiers.
• Diamond Wars are Fought Using Child Warriors
• Many diamond producing governments and rebel forces use children as soldiers, laborers in military camps, and sex slaves. Child soldiers are given drugs to overcome their fear and reluctance to participate in atrocities.
• Small Arms Trade is Intimately Related to Diamond Smuggling
• Illicit diamonds inflame the clandestine trade of small arms. There are 500 million small arms in the world today which are used to kill 500,000 people annually, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.
• Slave Laborers Cut and Polish Diamonds
• More than one-half of the world’s diamonds are processed in India where many of the cutters and polishers are bonded child laborers. Bonded children work to pay off the debts of their relatives, often unsuccessfully. When they reach adulthood their debt is passed on to their younger siblings or to their own children.

Quotes from the book:

Diamonds maybe a girl’s best friend, but diamonds are paid for in blood. In the mines of Koidu, Sierra Leone, “a mixture of RUF militants, adult and child conscripts and local miners has turned every possible diamond site into a pile of mud”. The illicit diamond trade has led to war, suffering and violence in Angola, the Congo and Liberia. In Sierra Leone this trade has left a trail of summary execution, torture and indiscriminate machete attacks.

Diamonds are hard to track and easy to smuggle. Once hidden they are undetectable by airport sniffer-dogs, maintain their value in the market and are hard to identify, making it extremely difficult to know where your diamond earrings, ring or necklace were mined. In the UK, diamonds often name Switzerland as their country of origin - diamond mines in Switzerland?

A rebel’s best friend? “Diamonds are forever” it is often said, but lives are not. We must spare people the ordeal of war, mutilations and death for the sake of conflict diamonds” Martin Chungong Ayafor, Chairman of the Sierra Leone Panel of Experts.

Osama bin Laden has also benefited from conflict diamonds, according to the Washington Post. The Liberian government were indirectly funding the Al Qa’ida network with the proceeds from conflict diamonds. A Global Witness letter to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, stated, “Al-Qa’ida has derived millions of US dollars from diamonds mined by the RUF and carried out in the co-operation of the Liberian government with President Charles Taylor receiving commission on these transactions”.

further reading:

diamond link 1 diamond link 2 diamond link 3 diamond link 4 diamond link 5 diamond link 6 diamond link 7 diamond link 8 diamond link 9 diamond link 10 diamond link 11

I’ve been listening to books on CD as I drive the entire 5 minutes to work and back each day. Lately, I’ve very much enjoyed Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth Davis.

Besides a wealth of interesting trivia (which I’ll likely list later), Kenneth explores American history in a way that would make mad, (in the extreme) traditionalists and revisionists alike. (You should know, however, Kenneth leans closer towards the revisionists). Perhaps a bit of summary is in order:

The very traditionalists would have us believe that the Founding Fathers were infallible, perfect giants-of-men who lived with courage, honor and class in the halcyon days of yore. Benjamin Franklin, to them, was a kindly old gentleman who spent his strength tinkering with inventions in his cellar and dishing out words of wisdom in his Almanac. Washington was a heroic figure who couldn’t lie, who, while standing up, crossed the Delaware in a boat and who prayed by his horse in forests before battles.

In the other camp, staunch revisionism, we have those who paint these same men as hedonistic, degenerate knaves, hell-bent on exploitation, improprieties and power. To them, scant and inconclusive DNA evidence unequivocally proves an illicit sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. They’d have you believe that ‘ol Ben Franklin was but a clever cad and that bumbling General Washington never won a battle. They view the early Americans as a widely self concerned, corrupt group of rich white men, who accidentally stumbled on a few good ideas.

To be sure, that the Founding Fathers were as brilliant and as talented a group as the world has ever seen is not under review. That such Herculean results came from their efforts, no one can deny. The controversy is this — what kind of men were they, privately? (and how should they be depicted?)

And so we must look at motives. The old school might argue that glossing over of the infrequent improper acts only serves to better inspire humankind to greatness. They likely question, “Why focus on the negative?”

Recent, modern thought takes a different perspective. Some would claim that, as they magnify the defects of great men, to “show their humanity,” they demonstrate that good men can do bad things and thereby encourage all of us equally imperfect beings on to great deeds.

“So who is right and who is dead?” (Vizzini)

You have the topic, now “talk amongst yourselves”. I’ll chime in when I get a spare moment.