Authenticity as a "more-or-less person"
I spent a day without my phone today. Without it, I wasn't able to login to my Gmail or my Penn account -- the forced relief from classes made me do different things. I roamed Van Pelt library for most of the day, searching through hundreds of titles amongst the "stacks." Eventually in the Lipincott Stacks, I came across a book called Authenticity In Culture, Self, and Society. I wrote down some quotes on one of the chapters:
"Selves only exist in definite relationships to other selves."
"Being authentic in today's world does not necessarily mean one is remaining true too some sort of unified or contradictory self."
"Authenticity is a situational coincidence of concurrent and emergent definition of the situations and is, therefore, experienced in an eternal flow of the "more-or-less."
"The "more-or-less person" embodies selves,, claims identities, and occupies roles that approximate what one desires or expects of one's self and what others desire or expect from that person -- rarely id it entirely one or the other"
Accepting my "more-or-less" person is not always an easy thing to do. Some people really make me feel like the "more," and others a lot like the "less." Unfortunately, the "less" ones are not easy to remove from my life, thus making it a "me" problem.
The book also touched on authenticity in aboriginal communities in Ontario, many many studies (it was at many points written more as a "review"), and lots of unintuitive uses of the word authenticity.
Also spent time today:
Reading Musings on Markets, Aswath Damodaran's blog.
Instacart valuation; one separate takeaway was around his thoughts that the best VCs tend to mimic really good traders (exit timing). Only the early investors like Khosla, YC, and Sequoia made money.
FCFl; I'm still struggling with mechanistically understanding FCF. My shoddy accounting knowledge / trouble rebuilding a SCF from a 10-K definitely contributes.
He has a free accounting course, which I'll definitely be reviewing
Reading Valuations textbook from Wessels. Somehow ended up taking a 30 minute or so nap in the middle of Lipincott while reading it
Reviewed Taxes. Why the statutory tax rate vs. effective tax rate vs operating tax rate because of lumpy one-time taxes and R&D credits
Why we use EBIT instead of EBITDA when comparing for Enterprise Value (EV).
Companies may pay higher for a CapEx and then depreciate more, leading to lower taxes? Need to refresh on the example, not yet mastered
Read up on Covera Health, which is a software providing quality standards for radiologists and thus cheaper / higher quality patient care.