The best Business & Investing Skills books: Reddit reviews

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In terms of war, corruption, oppression, unnecessary deaths, and overall human well-being, this is by far the best time to be alive in human history.

It’s really not even close.

For those that are actually interested:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250107814/ref=cm_sw_r_oth_api_i_ujXXDbDQ5PDWJ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143111388/ref=cm_sw_r_oth_api_i_0nXXDbKSSRGA7

>I can't go to the bathroom without missing atleast 1 phone call from someone about something breaking.

Don't worry about that. Hell, I straight up ignore my phone sometimes even when I'm right beside it. Priorities and such.

>if I need to start looking elsewhere for more pay to offset the stress

Not a bad idea. Always be cognizant of what's out there.

As others have said, bring it up professionally with your boss. His response will help sway the "should I look elsewhere" decision.

Another good suggestion is to work on time management skills. Here's a highly recommended book around here.

And you have vacation days for a reason. Use them. If you try to but they never approve it, then that's a big red flag.

Before you go and negotiate the salary read THIS book. Or do the audio book. There is a section on negotiating salary but the whole book is useful. Really changed the way I talk with people.

You’re not wrong. Even in developing countries it’s better than at any time in history. Check out the book Factfullness if you like to read. It’s pretty amazing.

Read this.

Or just Chomsky's essays on Vietnam, widely available for free online.

The US were the aggressors in a war of imperialism at first to maintain French colonial control of Indochina and then excused their Holocaust of Vietnamese civilians and combatants defending their homeland from bombs and genocide and torture with unverified notions of "domino theory" as part of a larger ideological war repeatedly used to excuse imperialism, torture, surveillance, genocide, repression, and domestic wealth disparity.

They engaged in widespread, consistent carpet-bombing, torture, repression, chemical and biological warfare, environmental destruction, Roman Plowing, and massacre on the people of South Vietnam. They installed a puppet regime and eliminated democracy and purged dissidents and civilians alike. They marched through destroyed villages and massacred the survivors after bombing them with millions of tonnes of bombs, far greater in a few years, than all the bombs dropped during WWII. Their environmental destruction is still devastating and lead to widespread famine and starvation and poverty.

Some reliable historians estimate 2 million Vietnamese died, or some figures have it at 1.5M. A great, great many were civilians and the combatants were defending their homeland against these atrocities, so they were also innocent. The war accomplished nothing but a communist victory in Vietnam and the US repeatedly broke their own peace agreements concluding the war. They pushed Vietnam into systemic, long-lasting poverty thereafter. The only thing the war accomplished was widespread suffering.

>More specifically, it's Disney lobbying very hard

Yes but lets not mince words here, there has been many times the government has been able to protect the public interest but didn't.

Our governments do not work like we think they do because we've been mis-educated.

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Jaynes. I actually remember a sentence from the first chapter (probably not an exact quote, but I can't be bothered to go find my copy), "When asked, 'What is consciousness?' people become conscious of consciousness, and believe that consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not the case."

It's engaging and well-written, but his theory wasn't all that influential in the long run. The brain is so much more complicated than left brain/right brain...We as humans definitely have a friction between our logical minds and our impulsive instinctive minds, but it's deeper than they believed back then.

An interesting modern read would be Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman...He's a Nobel prize winning economist who has done a lot of work about human decision making in an attempt to figure out how it drives economic decision making. He's coming at it from a completely different direction, but if anything, that makes his stuff more interesting.

> "Collectively, the world is more stressed, worried, sad and in pain today than we've ever seen it,"

I would contend that this statement from the article is contentious. Was the world less stressed during the major wars that have plagued it? What about the cold war?

Here are multiple counterexamples of things going better: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814

Scroll down and have a look at the graphs

Lastly, this is a short time-span. Movement upwards could simply be regression toward/away from the mean

If you want to understand the thinking behind this, I highly recommend reading the book that Bill Gates just gifted to every person graduating college this year: Factfulness https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814

In fact, I recommend reading it anyway, if for no other reason than for the good tips on improving your critical thinking skills.

Public attitudes are shaped and driven by the media. If the public doesn't care, it's because we've spent years conditioning them not to care. If the public in general can't name many middle eastern cultures beyond "Muslim", that is very much the fault of the media.

If prominent newspapers started giving front page headlines to the plight of the Kurds, you'd certainly see a considerable public reaction, but right now the cycle is dominated by the anti-communist Hong-Kong protest coverage because it serves an agenda for the United States. Kurds being killed because the American government made the decision to abandon them? That's a bad look on America and the media won't give it nearly as much attention. See Manufacturing Consent on this dynamic.

I really really recommend reading Manufacturing Consent to anyone who hasn't. Its as relevant today as when it was written. One of its focuses is on New York Times: https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499 or however the heck you read books. I don't think Noam would give a crap if you pirate it.

Prof. Chomsky literally co-wrote the book on how the media is used by the ruling class to get the public to buy into the establishment narrative.

Give this book a read. https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499

> The net is that the article isn’t really about DC or the protesters, but rather to raise awareness about the reliability of video as a medium and how we should be critical consumers in this viral video age.

And take it one step further, with a sprinkling of Chomsky salt: the media has an agenda and they will do their best to exploit cherrypicking of video, text, audio, etc. to tell their own narrative. Viral videos are certainly dangerous since there's no level of editorial oversight. But even editors at large corporate media see their "wall" between content and business broken down to spin stories a certain way. The most common tool is "lie by omission" since it technically isn't lying or dirty. In fact, it's even similar to the original Lincoln Memorial video.

edit: I realize a book isn't the most accessible source for /r/neutralnews, but the wikipedia article does a decent enough job summarizing the main topics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> I have a theory that your brain tries to "automate" processes and to do them subconsciously when it feels confident enough about it.

You should read the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - excellent read that I would highly recommend. I think you'd find the book interesting, and it discusses this topic in depth.

I try to shut off the hysterics as much as possible. NEVER watch tv news and especially none of the dedicated news channels.

Also read and think about things like this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814/

In The E-myth Revisited, Michael Gerber paraphrased a quote from Gen. George Patton. It has stuck with me for many years after having read the book.

>The comfort zone makes cowards of us all.

​

The best book to read as a developer is The Design of Everyday Things. If every developer read it, the software world would be a better place.

> I think the primary problem is that the business is "me" and I'm having a difficult time transitioning from a "freelancer" to a "business" in a way that still keeps me flush with reliable income.

Read The E-Myth Revisited.

The first chapter or so will resonate with you deeply as the whole book is about turning your business into an actual business that can function without you so you can get your life back.

Look up Behaviorial Economics.

In particular, I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Also, here's another:

Endowment Effect: This is the tendency for us to value things we already own more than things we don't own. This is partly why loot boxes work, especially when they show they are "rare." You may not pay directly for a rare loot box, but if you already earned one... buying a key to open it is less problematic for many.

I just read The E-Myth Revisited and I cannot recommend it enough for any entrepreneur. It talks about how to build a sustainable business.

You don't need a co-founder and you don't need investors.

Build an MVP in 3 months and see how it goes.

Do not make the mistake of wasting 3 years to build something no one wants. Do not give half to a co-founder for something you can handle in the beginning.

Also, subscribe to Valuetainment. It has phenomenal content on everything you'd need.

> Nei selvfølgelig ikke. Og det er jo fordi det er politikken til folk som Obama-Biden og forgjengerne deres helt tilbake til Reagan som er grunnen til at en karakter som Trump i det hele tatt kom på banen og vant valget.

Så det at autoritære, populistiske politikere på høyresiden er på fremmarsj over hele verden, det er tilfeldig? Det er Demokratene sin feil?

>Et av endeløse problemene for liberalere som støtter den uendelige akselerasjonen til den globale teknokratiske kapitalismen er at jo raskere en økonomi endrer seg jo større del av befolkningen er det som blir kastet på dynga

Dette er fundamental feil. Det er lavere fattighet på verdensbasis i dag enn det noen gang har vært før. Globaliseringen har, uten sammenligning, gjort verden (både lokalt og verdensomspennende) bedre.

>de menneskene som blir kastet på dynga har dessverre for liberalerne fortsatt stemmerett.

Det er ingen som blir kastet på dynga. Du hadde hatt godt av å lese Hans Roslings bok <em>Factfulness</em>, det er mye du kan lære der.

Rosling's last book, Factfulness, tackles 10 common myths (or urban legends, if you wish) concerning the state of the world and how it is majorly improving, directly countering the majority view in the developed world.

Buy it at Amazon or Bookdepository (with free shipping worldwide).

There's a good book on this called "The E Myth" that might help shed some light on this for you. It's not a huge long book, but it goes into the idea that running a business is entirely different than working in your field.

Also, try to keep in perspective your experience. If you fail, so what? You have a great opportunity here to try something. If it works then great! If not, you might go back to a 9-5 with a new appreciation for the simplicity of it all.

Commonality of design.

Both are objects meant for throwing by hand. It would follow there is an ideal size for handheld thrown objects, and therefore handheld thrown objects would be the same size.

Same reason doors you push and doors you pull have different handles and it feels wrong when the wrong handle is used for the wrong side.

Read The Design of Everyday Things to learn more.

I've personally spent a lot of time on Less Wrong, but... I do have to admit that it's kind of an insular place using their own made-up jargon to promote strange ideas. Overall I approve of it and don't put much stock in the usual criticisms, but I wouldn't direct people to it if I wanted to convince them of anything.

Instead, I'd direct them to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. It's just as accessible as Less Wrong's better-written posts, it covers a lot of the same stuff, and it's written by someone with the credentials to back up their claims.

And best of all, it includes regular examples that demonstrate your own biases to you. Examples like this, where you can actually catch your own brain making a mistake, are more likely to get through to someone who doesn't believe in, say, racial or gender bias.

Time to have a come-to-Jesus talk with this man. Brush up on your "crucial conversations" skills, let him know your expectations of him, that you support him, and see if he's interested in development opportunities. Basically - be a good leader. He'll either come around or he won't.

Humans are not intuitively good at probability and statistics, because of numerous cognitive biases. -Thinking: Fast &amp; Slow

Lähteeksi on mainittu Hans Roslingin tuore kirja Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

People have always been treated like shit, though. As I understand it, what's changed is our exposure. With 24/7 media/internet, we're just seeing things we wouldn't have seen before. They were still happening before. We just didn't see them. It's also much easier to focus on specific types of discourse and information and that can make it seem like such information is increasing in amount. It's not. We're just exposing ourselves to more of it. If I started following r/Malta, it'd be tempting in a couple months to slide into the thinking that shit is "suddenly" heading south there. All the bad stories. All the abuses. In reality, it was always there because people are dicks regardless. Collectively, from what I understand, though, things are overall getting better in a lot of ways. I don't know how much bias is in it, but someone recommended the book Factfulness the other day. Haven't ordered it yet, but I'm going to because personally I'd like a little positivity in my geopolitical forecasts for once.

Practice. Lots of practice. If you go into a negotiation not willing to lose it all, you've already lost.

Interview for jobs. You should always be looking.

Making friend and influencing people is good.

Also: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062407805/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_tWsWBbKWP1BB7