Lady in Gold What the Art Says

Interesting Reads for the week:

 

http://nautil.us/issue/69/patterns/gustav-klimt-in-the-brain-lab

https://thewalrus.ca/is-the-world-getting-better-or-worse/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-greatest-investor-youve-never-heard-of-an-optometrist-who-beat-the-odds-to-become-a-billionaire/#76fc311022e8

Knowing how to profit from your craft Thanks to Pablo Picasso

Was just told about the Pablo Picasso story creating a drawing for a fan in merely minutes and then asking for the equivalent of $500,000 in dollars today. She was offended and said but why would I ever pay that much when it took you only minutes to do? The answer was that it's not the time it takes to do something it's the skills behind being able to do so and that is what you pay for said the Spanish Artist. It took me 30 years to refine my craft and that is what you are paying for.

This is no difference than the plumber who comes to your house to fix your Air Conditioner and takes a look at the machine, asks for a hammer, bangs the machine once and fixes the issue and asks for $1000. Knowing how to use that hammer and the skills behind your craft are whats valuable.

Replicator 3D Printing Technology

As I was an early adopoter to the current 3D printing Boom and growth that we've been seeing over the last decade especially with the growth and success of Protos Eyewear the first consumer grade 3D printed eyewear that also is completely customizable based on the metrics of your face I was amazed to see Scientific American with the replicator article today. It scans the object and completely replicates it as one solid piece as opposed to additive manufacturing layer by layer. Curious to learn more about this (if you come across this and do please contact me).

With the Protos Eyewear project the crafting and customizing of the hinges proved to be one of the most difficult tasks so I'm curious how this would replicate a pair of high end eyewear?

Reference: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forget-everything-you-know-about-3-d-printing-mdash-the-replicator-is-here/

-Richart Ruddie

 

Carbon farming - Holistic Planned Grazing - Agroforestry & Regenerative Agriculture

Certain trends and innovations that we can apply can not only improve conditions that we thought were almost irreversible. Similar to the recent bookmark I made about Plastics being recycled and how this would create a conglomerate bigger than Apple & Google combined. The information below I'm bookmarking courtesy of Tom:

Carbon Farming is a point of very high leverage to reverse climate change by taking one of the highest offenders of co2 release and turning it into a net sink while giving farmers a better chance in the market and strengthening local food economies:

Carbon farming is the broad term used for a suite of practices which aim to sequestor carbon from the atmosphere into either biomass or into soil. It is very important because agriculture is one of the leading causes of co2 emissions and therefore climate change. It is also a driver of climate change in that as trees and other perennial vegetation are removed from landscapes evaporation transportation is reduced, breaking the water cycle. Less water being transpired into the air means dryer climates, and greater temperature instability.

Many solutions to climate change are important and effective however this is a much higher leverage point than most because you are essentially taking a huge driver of climate change and not only stopping it, but reversing it. The models of how effective this could be in a relatively short amount of time to reduce the impacts of climate change are incredible(see the works of Paul Hawkins and Eric Toensmeir for numbers)

Within carbon farming there are many different practices however Agroforestry is proving to be one of the most effective, not only because it is essentially the incorporation of trees into landscapes which obviously helps solve the problems raised above but it also benefits farmers by helping them have a more diversifed production portfolio which can hedge against bad production years or market forces. In many cases it can help them shift away from commodities with very thin margins towards higher value crops that can be sold in more local and regional markets which helps the community over all.

Within agroforestry there is a specific practice called silvopasture which essentially means grazing animals under tree systems. When grazing animals are managed within a Holistic Planned Grazing Framework they can draw down and sequestor tremendous amounts of carbon in places that are not suitable for vegetable crop production (slopes, rocky areas, etc.) (see the work of Allan Savory/Savory Institute )and Holistic Management International.

Great story from Institutional investor on how A.I. and machine learning scraping search results and social media is a way to determine trends and future retail products to invest in. Another segment that CircleUp is missing is utilizing retail sites and trends on there as well to find hot products. Glad to provide more clarity as things progress for Ryan Caldbeck's venture!

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c640md2kgp81/This-San-Francisco-Investor-Wants-to-Revolutionize-Private-Equity-Is-He-Crazy

The most important day of your life but to me it was Tuesday

Below is a clip which is coined as one of the best quotes ever from one of the worst movies ever. Street Fighter where M. Bison talks about his incoherence to Chung Liu's most fateful day. In the scene above "I'm sorry I don't remember any of it.. You don't remember. For you the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life but to me it was Tuesday." This is such a relevant quote because of things that are crazy in many people's eyes are just another day for somebody else. Tuesday in this case..

Recycle Plastic and Become the worlds largest company

This past years winner from The Royal statistical society was for a creative number was for 90.5% thats the amount of plastic that can be recycled in the world to create a multi-trillion dollar company. The 90.5% is the amount of plastic that is currently unrecycled. Sustainable companies that positively impact the world are a growing trend. Look at the success of the Beyond and Impossible Burgers. Instead of paraphrasing the piece read part of it below and the rest of it at:

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full

Plastics have outgrown most man-made materials and have long been under environmental scrutiny. However, robust global information, particularly about their end-of-life fate, is lacking. By identifying and synthesizing dispersed data on production, use, and end-of-life management of polymer resins, synthetic fibers, and additives, we present the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever manufactured. We estimate that 8300 million metric tons (Mt) as of virgin plastics have been produced to date. As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. If current production and waste management trends continue, roughly 12,000 Mt of plastic waste will be in landfills or in the natural environment by 2050.

Dinosaurs Coming Back to this World in 2029

In the next 5 to 10 years we will start to see the re-emergence of Dinosaurs in our planet. What affects and how this will work over the long run will be one that I'm excited to see. The Wolly mammoth is another species that is being re-born into our society and there was a brief 60 minutes segment about this.

References: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/06/scientists-say-they-could-recreate-living-dinosaurs-within-five-to-10-years.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/the-race-to-resurrect-woolly-mammoths/

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/should-we-bring-back-the-woolly-mammoth/

A big part of leadership is deciding, and good decision-making benefits from intelligence, thoughtful deliberation, and experience, but also, as i hope you agree, from sound values.

Seth Klarman a hedge fund manager from the Boston, Massachusetts area that I have admired for years and author of one of my favorite finance books "Margin of Safety" has a great quote in a recent Harvard Business School speech. The quote is "A big part of leadership is deciding, and good decision-making benefits from intelligence, thoughtful deliberation, and experience, but also, as i hope you agree, from sound values."

Other great lessons in the piece can be found here for my reference: https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx?num=6818

Who Will Be Todays Chiune Sugihara?

While the crisis of World War 2 is not an apples to apples comparison by any means the future hopefully will reveal the unsung heroes like Chiune Sugihara who was recently re-honored in a nice NY Times piece seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/opinion/sugihara-moral-heroism-refugees.html

 

Some excerpts from the piece:

“heroic imagination,” a focus on one’s duty to help and protect others. This ability is exceptional, but the people who have it are often understated. Years after the war, Sugihara spoke about his actions as natural: “We had thousands of people hanging around the windows of our residence,” he said in a 1977 interview. “There was no other way.”

A second characteristic of such heroes and heroines, as the psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes, is “that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.” While the world around him disregarded the plight of the Jews, Sugihara was unable to ignore their desperation.

“I told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was a matter of humanity. I did not care if I lost my job. Anyone else would have done the same thing if they were in my place.”

Decades from now we will likely here the stories of those fleeing violence and corruption in their country and how a man or woman came to their rescue...time will tell?