Some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.
Lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversati...
Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone?
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,
What was the secret to dealing with the assholes? Lift weights or learn karate, said O’Grady.
Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really...
Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, DC, propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. P...
This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a pe...
Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinfor...
They appeared to know enough to justify their jobs, and nothing more.
There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It’s impossible to know for sure. What will the price of oil be in ten years? was such a question. That...
There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. Program management is n...
The trouble, Danny suspected, was that the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something o...
The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.
The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The H...
The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.
RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to talk about your experience of being...
If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s...
If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but...
If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.Bill James