Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Year Twenty Begins

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The longer I live, the shorter life gets.

It’s a truism, I suppose, and one of many which occur to humans as the years roll by. See, I started Slope as a pure-brown-haired lad in my 30s. As Slope now commences its 20th (God help me……..) year, the temples are greying, the teeth are decaying, and creditors are weighing my purse. Well, no, only the first of those is true, but I could not help letting a little Broadway slip into my off-the-cuff musings.

Prior to 2005, March 29th was just another day in the year, but now, every year, I think about what I’m going to write on the birthday of my electronic child. I was especially concerned this year since, frankly, I’ve never felt more despondent, more angst-ridden, more (dare I say it?) hopeless about the prospects we’ll ever see a real stock market again.

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San Francisco No-Goodnik

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Like most cities in the United States, San Francisco is up to its neck in public “servants”, all of them vastly overpaid, underworked, and fiercely protected by public employee unions. For every 20 people in San Francisco, there is 1 employee of the City of San Francisco, which is a stunning ratio. Rest assured, these thousands of not-so-hard-working employees are deep into the six figures with respect to their salaries and benefits, but there’s one chap in particular I’d like to highlight: one Mr. Stanley Ellicott, who it was discovered in January had been charged with stealing expensive gear from San Francisco and selling them on eBay.

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Go Fourth: Crucial Knowledge

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As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I was delighted to see The Fourth Turning is Here book, which I purchased and read over the course of just a couple of days (which is no mean feat, since this sucker is nearly 500 pages long).

I truly enjoyed the book, although I’d say easily 70-80% of the book is there for fleshing out the concepts. The entire thesis of this book, as well as its prediction about what is to come, could be condensed down to probably about thirty pages or so. This is not to say that the bulk of the book is fluff; it’s simply not essential to the points being made.

I’m certainly not going to try to boil it down further into a single post, but I’d at least like to share a variety of thoughts and impressions drawn from my reading. I’m going to be completely lazy and just bang this out as a series of individual, disjointed paragraphs. I’ve also interspersed a variety of graphics that are related to the content.

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