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February 20, 2021
Hi everyone, welcome to End Notes. Winter weather has settled in across the country so there's no better time to curl up by the window with some quality reads. I have a couple original pieces in the works, hoping to have something to share soon.
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No New Posts on Eric's Two Books This Week :(
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Stories Worth Sharing
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Life Lessons
Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)
Published in May 2013
Medium read
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"It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year."
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The Obligatory Morgan Housel Note
Morgan Housel (Collaborative Fund)
Published in December 2019
Short read
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"A few of the only useful hacks I know:
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Marketing hack: Make a good product that people need.
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PR hack: Do something newsworthy.
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Career hack: Work harder than is expected of you and be nice to people."
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Stuff You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know
Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger (ProPublica/The Atlantic)
Published in December 2018
Long read
"The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.
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The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. But even those stark numbers don’t tell the whole story, say current and former IRS employees: Auditors are stretched thin, and they’re often forced to limit their investigations and move on to the next audit as quickly as they can."
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The Crime Beat
Dylan Taylor-Lehman (Narratively)
Published in April 2020
Long read
"Whether its loads of canned corn or construction materials or 25,000 cell phones, truck thievery is surprisingly common. CargoNet, an industry group that tracks cargo theft, tallied roughly 2,600 truck thefts in 2019, with the average value of a trailer theft at around $148,000. Truck hijacking has of course been going on as long as there have been trucks — and before that, train and stagecoach robberies emerged an indispensable part of American folklore."
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Excerpt of the Week
From Henry David Thoreau's Walden:
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"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry."
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FYI, Amazon Prime members can read Walden for free -- just search via Prime Reading.
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