Rosano / Journal

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

["Resulting" is the evaluation of a choice based on outcome rather than its process; a different choice that appears to have "won" (especially by luck) wasn't necessarily a better decision or reflective of superior capacities.]

Part of: Dan Bortolotti: Reboot Your Portfolio.

this will make them talk your ears off…

[People more often ask you to explain what happened rather than what it means.]

[ETFs tend to declare distributions and pay out in January, which makes it a useful moment to schedule your yearly rebalance.]

Part of: Dan Bortolotti: Reboot Your Portfolio.

Monday, September 14, 2026

[ETFs tracker errors (not matching its benchmark), withholding taxes, and management fees mean that multiple funds tracking the same instruments can have inconsistent results. Compare fund returns with benchmark returns to get a sense for the diff.]

Part of: Dan Bortolotti: Reboot Your Portfolio.

Sunday, September 13, 2026

There's so much water, how can there be a shortage?

[The simple model of a water cycle we learned in school outlines rain falling jnto rivers and ebing carried back to the ocean. Most of our existence is between falling and the rivers.]

[Soil, swamps, plants, and beavers slow down watr before heading to the rivers. Concrete repels water directly into drains so that it leaves faster.]

[Water supply will strain when it is disconnected from natural deposits into aquifers. This can happen through sities, coal mining, golf courses, data centres, and industrial practices that pass water through the cycle faster.]

Saturday, September 12, 2026

posted to Occasion

most human human

Conversation is best as duet instead of duel.

[Allocate less to equities at retirement, but maintain enough to benefit from a remaining investment timeframe of about 20–30 years.]

[Hold bonds in your local currency. Exposure to other currencies adds risk to what should be a safe-haven asset.]

[The Dow (with 30 commitee-selected entries) and NASDAQ 100 (only non-financial) are poorly diversified and not a gauge of the broad market.]

Part of: Dan Bortolotti: Reboot Your Portfolio.

Reading is an encounter with possible worlds.

[Authoritarians don't like people reading because it increases the number of imaginable worlds contradicts the idea that there is only one version of history.]

Lesser of two evils?

[People eager to frame their problems through other people's identity don't want to question the underlying system, only taking a stance on banking through the lense of bankers being Jewish, or on protection of women through the lense of offenders being Muslim.]

[Choosing between "the lesser of two evils" in democratic elections reflects a continuous oscillation between radical pro-oligarch and moderate pro-oligarch where both further the same agenda. The former capitalizes on our frustration with the system by promising meaningful change and enacting laws by force to server the wealthy. The latter attempts to sooth our disappointment of authoritarian overstep by promising a return to sanity but following the laws created by the former.]

Friday, September 11, 2026

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Monday, September 7, 2026

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Saturday, September 5, 2026

posted to Now

September 2026

conscious organizing is the practice

[Template interactions like "Je voudrais un hot dog, s'il vous plaît … merci!"; "Où est le WC? … merci!" are simple to use, but have no cultural or experiential value, and treat the other as a machine. If someone gives a surprising or interesting response, you might miss it.] Wielding language's magic is intoxicating; becoming susceptible to it, even more so.

[Inormation entropy as "how unique or surprising is this?" threads through: text prediction, text generation, autocorrect, search, cloze tests, data compression and transmission, encryption, memory, summarization, random noise, language learning, language evolution…]

["They lived happily ever after" in information entropy terms means "Nothing noteworthy happened for the rest of their lives".]

[People ask "how did you meet your spouse?" and not "how did you stay married?" because the latter is a story of struggle and pain.]

[Advice from someone who responds less predictably has more value because of entropy.]

[Pithy marketing phrases are "clichés with a diff".]

Part of: Brian Christian: The Most Human Human.

Friday, September 4, 2026

[War can be "popular" but never the collective choice of a population.]

Bana: Fidjo de Ninguém

thought this was some kind of quaint samba but learned it's morna with lyrics in Cape Verdean Creole.

[Drug dealers and their clients have to constantly invent new language as if they were poets when referring to substances, because known euphemisms or clichés can mean jail.]

[Latin speakers naming those with whom they break bread "com-panis" ("with bread") led to our word "companion".]

[People are always changing as you get to know them—partly due to your presence; they are never still.]

[Neurons change their connection structure each time they fire. Functional brains change. Experience changes you or it didn't happen. Relating is risky because you can't get to know someone without changing them or somewhat becoming them.]

[We can't actually touch anything: our perception of contact is really body atoms and table atoms exerting electromagnetic force on each other—dynamic exchange rather than static contact.]

Part of: Brian Christian: The Most Human Human.