I thought that this week I would write down some of the quotes I’ve highlighted in the books I’ve been reading recently, simply because I think there extremely well worded. Anna Lee Huber writes light mystery novels.

“I valued my own privacy too much to meddle in hers.” - Anna Lee Huber - this encapsulates my philosophy in a nutshell about trying to get involved with other people. Hopefully, nobody needs this explained. And in a similar vein she also had a line in one of her novels that “…there is certainly much to be said against promiscuous introductions.” - Amen to that.

I have to admit, we are socially conditioned to make introductions. I have recently, maybe the last two or three times, consciously not introduced somebody I was with to somebody else that I had met. It is a little bit awkward. No doubt about that. But, I saw no particular reason that the two people in question needed to be introduced. And I am sure that on one side at least in both occasions, the person was happy or not being introduced. A skill I will try to work on.

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” – Elbert Hubbard - this quote within one of Anna Lee Huber’s books and it is something that I believe I am guilty of. Something else to work on.

“I have a gift for debauchery. It is why I have largely given it up. There is no real thrill in sinning when one has a talent for it.” - Deanna Raybourn - another author of mystery novels that I like. It was a quote from one of her characters, and to some extent, I identify with it. 😊

John Ringo is one of my favorite hard-core military science fiction authors. I have a very large number of volumes of his work. The following quote applies, I believe, to working outside one’s native culture or comfort zone. And I think that the ability to do this is critical to survival and being effective.

“Part of why I can do this job so effectively is that I just ignore the cognitive dissonance and look at the situation as it actually is.”

It may be that the situation that you’re in is completely fucked up. It may be that you are working with people who think that lying, being late, being inefficient, stealing, etc. are all totally normal things to do. However, being flummoxed by the cognitive dissonance, or railing about it, certainly is not going to help you get the job done. So, ignore it the best as you can and drive on.

Ovidia Yu wrote a series of murder mysteries based in Singapore. Two quotes that I particularly liked were:

“They much preferred complaining to making decisions on their own.” - How many people do we know like this?

“… far as Aunty Lee was concerned, people ought to go through the ideas they carried around in their heads as regularly as they turned out their store cupboards. No matter how wisely you shopped, there would be things in the depths that were past their expiration dates or gone damp and moldy—or that had been picked up on impulse and were no longer relevant. Aunty Lee believed everything inside a head or cupboard could affect everything else in it by going bad or just taking up more space than it was worth.” - I think she says this extraordinarily well. Now, if I could only convince the majority of the world’s population to take this to heart. ☹

“Fragile egos are at the root of almost every conflict.” - Kevin Hearne – Ain’t that the truth?

In the category of rolling on the floor laughing my ass off, the Saudi Aramco IPO. What a joke. First of all, this is one of the most corrupt, inefficient, badly run companies on the face of the planet. The only reason they’re in business is because they have foreigners doing most of the critical jobs, and it only cost them a couple of dollars to get the oil out of the ground. If you compare a couple dollars per barrel to the price of oil per barrel you can see that they have an incredible profit margin. They are inbred, egotistical to the point of stupidity (they want to insist that Saudis can do everything that’s critical in the company), and the company is basically a piggy bank for thousands of moronic princelings in the Saudi royal family.

Having an IPO means that they are selling a portion of the company (usually about 20% for most IPOs) to the public. Which, when they do on a real stock exchange, means that they have to have transparency. They must open their books. Talk about being on the horns of a dilemma. Transparency is the one thing that Saudi Aramco, or in fact any Saudi organization, cannot abide. So, they went, hat in hand, to all these various stock exchanges and none of them would relax the transparency requirements. Not to mention that they were looking for a $2 trillion valuation for the IPO. So now, having all of the banks tell them that the valuation is only between $1.2 to $1.6 trillion, and having been turned down on any relaxing of the transparency requirements, they have finally decided to launch their IPO on the Saudi Arabian stock exchange. Quick, who has ever heard of that? Even that exchange was only willing to value it at approximately $1.8 trillion. The rumor now is that wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia are being “encouraged” to buy the stock. And, they’re only selling 5%.

What a farce. I wish I could get on the world stage where billions of people could hear what I had to say and just lambaste them with ridicule. They deserve it. They run an organization like this for decades, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on the royal family, and then they want to raise money for bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” [his plan to make the Saudi economy ready for the post-oil era] but they don’t want anybody to know what they’re doing. Having worked inside Saudi Aramco for three years I can tell you it is only that insane profit margin and foreigners that keep the company functional.

Well I guess the Crown Prince needs something to keep him busy when he isn’t arranging to have journalists chopped to pieces in his embassies.