Derek Scruggs

Just got back from Cancun and decided to document it on Dopplr. Check it out.

From Gretchen:

When money or health is a problem, you think about it all the time; when it’s not a problem, you don’t think much about it. Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness. One of the greatest luxuries that money and health provide is the freedom from having to think about them.

From, of all places, a comment on Slashdot:

Imagine two baskets.

One contains all the things explained by the phrase “god did it”. The other contains all the things explained by “science”.

A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.

Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.

So what’s left in the god basket? Good question — but that’s not where I’m going with this, because actually that’s irrelevant.

The point is this: there has never — never ever ever — been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.

The traffic is all one way.

I’m an atheist and generally find most arguments on behalf of religion to be tedious and self-serving. But I just read an interesting one from none other Charlie Munger:

I’ll go further: I say economic systems work better when there’s an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. We have a charming Irish Catholic priest in our neighborhood and he loves to say, “Those old Jews may have invented guilt , but we perfected it.” (Laughter). And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.

The rest of the presentation is pretty teriffic, too. Here are a couple other chestnuts.

On Arthur Laffer:

When I talk about this false precision, this great hope for reliable, precise formulas, I am reminded of Arthur Laffer, who’s in my political party, and who is one of the all-time horse’s asses when it comes to doing economics. His trouble is his craving for false precision, which is not an adult way of dealing with his subject matter.

On Freud:

The third weakness that I find in economics is what I call physics envy. And of course, that term has been borrowed from penis envy as described by one of the world’s great idiots, Sigmund Freud. But he was very popular in his time, and the concept got a wide vogue.

Get it here.

Best quote I’ve read so far this morning:

“I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have. I felt that if I could help students overcome the fear rejection with cold-calling and cold e-mail, it would serve them forever.”

How to Get George Bush or the CEO of Google on the Phone

Educational!

I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney, but this is my candidate for simultaneously dumbest and most biased headline of the day:

Mike Huckabee Opts Not to Talk About Mitt Romney’s Mormon Faith

An excellent postmortem about Enthusiast Group:

I feel like I have learned — the hard way — some truths about grassroots content and online community. This column is my small attempt at preventing you from going through similar business heartache

It’s nice having a respected rock star columnist as your partner, even when the news is bad.

As you may have heard, my latest venture failed. It was an angst-ridden time leading up to the decision to close our doors, but once it was made, life brightened considerably. No longer were we a train going down a track, sensing that the light at the end of the tunnel was actually another train. Now we were once again individual people, not co-founders, and the horizon spreads in front of us like Rocky Mountain sunrise. Or something like that. Can you tell I wasn’t an English lit major?

The freedom that comes with a wide open future is liberating (though sometimes a little scary). One of the nicest things was cleaning out my to-do list. I follow the Getting Things Done approach to task management, which means I capture all of life’s open loops on a master list and review them periodically (ideally weekly, but that’s an area where I too-often drop the ball).

This means I had a looooong list of things to do. The vast majority of them had to do with various company initiatives — sales opportunities, feature requests, bug fixes etc — and I gotta admit deleting all those tasks was like taking a breath of fresh air after being underwater for months.

I narrowed my projects list from 25 or so down to about three: close the company, sell assets and find a job. Feel free to help me out on any of those.

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