What I Just Read

Reading this book today, in this era, is a singularly depressing experience. Many of my generation, when we read this book at a more innocent time, thought of it like Orwell's 1984 : it's a warning, and it probably wouldn't happen.  But these aren't warnings. They are playbooks. And they are happening. The parallels and resemblances are astounding. Soma , the drug used throughout Huxley's futuristic society, has obvious analogies throughout modern American healthcare, starting with the first tranquilizers, and then mapping today to the entire cornucopia of soma -like meds people take to get through life. The various conditioning techniques of Brave New World very much get you thinking of the various forms of sociocultural conditioning we are exposed to today: from our school and university systems, media, and of course our governments. Honestly, many Americans today are as well-conditioned against reading books as any Delta-caste infant in Huxley's Neo-Pavlov

I can see why Ray Dalio sicced not one, not two, but three law firms on this book's author and publisher.  The Fund  piles up story after story after  story  about Dalio, and by the end he comes off as a world class jerk. I'd like to use a stronger word. Note also that for many years the financial media has blatantly simped for Dalio to the point where any naive media consumer would consider him an affable, introspective man, freely offering insights at fireside chats at Davos.  The fact that the exact opposite is true somehow fits perfectly with modernity. Nowadays, everything is inverted and everything is fake. Whenever you attempt to understand someone behind their media facade, you have to look for tells. See for example Dalio's painfully obvious revolving door problem at his firm, Bridgewater. Over many years Dalio brought in many, many accomplished and highly-regarded employees to work directly with him in senior positions, only to quietly fire them--all of them--so