Ramblings On A Tuesday Night; Buffett Buys More OXY -- March 7, 2023

Buffett: keeps buying OXY, link here. Warren Buffett / BRK tracked here.

Poolside:

• 70°F, humid -- very humid, calm; overcast; perfect for reading, blogging;
• I read the most depressing essay in The New Yorker today:
• "The End of the English Major," enrollment in the humanities in in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?
• the subject is incredibly depressing; I was unable to find one silver lining in the 11-page essay, but worse, after reading nine pages of it and skimming the last two pages, I don't think I learned one thing from the article. Seldom do I read an 11-page essay in The New Yorker and not learn one thing. Ouch. 
• the universities have no one to blame but themselves if they are unhappy with the current situation, but I don't think they care.
  

Paragraph after paragraph with nothing but depressing anecdotes, but I don't think anything was more depressing than this paragraph:

"Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction -- all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!" Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard's dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.

She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. "The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students [remember, this is Harvard] were really struggling to understand sentences as sentences -- like, having trouble identifying the subject and very," she said. "Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago."

My mind immediately turned to Karine Jean-Pierre whose first language was not English.

Phosphorus: This is a particularly "good" issue of The New Yorker for me. "Elemental Need: phosphorus helped save our way of life -- and now threatens to end it." Elizabeth Kolbert, p. 24 - 27, inclusive.

Of all things, the article explains why the US ended up with so many far-flung islands in the Pacific, including Midway Atoll, in the North Pacific. 

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All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

Investing: wow, I'm in a great mood. 

I got out of my comfort zone today and bought a few shares of RACE. Wow. I put all new money into "a 40-30-20-5-5 allotment," investing twice a month, the second and fourth week of every month. The "20" used to be 20% in oil but I'm so overweight in oil that I want to replace "oil" with something else. Today, that 20% went into RACE. My portfolio has about the same number of equities. I sold off all my Pfizer some time ago -- a one-trick pony that will struggle. Replaced PFE with RACE. I still don't know what the "20" will be going forward, but maybe for the time being RACE.

So, what else is new. I don't know. I'm working on the summer project that I will share with Sophia. I've still not told anyone ... can't wait to share it with "you." Maybe next week, this time.