The Old Lone Ranger

Surviving Trump

By Rich Marin | August 26, 2026 by Rich Marin

The Canadian trade dispute has escalated sharply this week. In January Mark Carney, a Harvard-trained and Goldman Sachs employed economist who is now the Prime Minister of Canada, gave a widely-discussed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” The core message of that was that the rules-based international order is effectively over. He argued that Canada was adapting by building strategic autonomy while still holding to values like…

Fiesta Redux

By Rich Marin | August 25, 2026 by Rich Marin

It’s Monday morning and we’ve just completed a weekend that was mostly in the high 90s. I see that yesterday topped out at 98, but I think I saw 105 on the truck thermometer at one point in my travels. The good news is that it didn’t put a damper on our fiesta on Saturday evening. We had a marvelous time, as did most of the attendees from what we have heard. Everyone got into…

Love

Peace Out

By Rich Marin | August 24, 2026August 22, 2026 by Rich Marin

I’m sitting at San Francisco Airport waiting for the last flight back to San Diego. I flew up here this afternoon, was on the ground for five hours and spent two of those in the city visiting with a friend. This was an unexpected trip but one that very much needed to be made because some big decisions were made and friends need to support friends when they make such big decisions. “Peace out” as…

Business Advice Politics

Debt Bomb

By Rich Marin | August 23, 2026 by Rich Marin

The National Debt is front page news this week. It seems time to ponder the issue and try to put it in perspective. It is said that debt is what helped make this country great and there is some history to suggest that. The debt began at Independence during the Revolutionary War, which left the young country roughly $75 million in the hole. It was the great Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 plan to have the federal…

Politics

About Politics

By Rich Marin | August 22, 2026 by Rich Marin

My friend Steve just sent me a piece by Garrison Keillor that was uncharacteristically political in nature. He mentioned that he realizes that I have been writing less about politics, but thought I might enjoy reading Keillor’s ramblings on the subject. If I had to liken my writing to anyone’s (only aspirationally, of course) it would be to Garrison Keillor. Keillor’s writing is warm, wry, and nostalgic, built on a folksy Midwestern storyteller’s cadence, the…

Memoir

August Calm

By Rich Marin | August 21, 2026 by Rich Marin

It’s only Wednesday and it feels like it’s been a long week already. That is mostly due to the water main leak emergency I have had to endure. I have had to have my irrigation guy come and tell me he thinks there’s a leak in the main line. I have had the big bad leak detection company come and spend three or four hours traipsing the property with radar and sonar devices. Underground leak…

Love Memoir

Kindness and Other Fables

By Rich Marin | August 20, 2026 by Rich Marin

Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…

Memoir

Gettin’ It Done

By Rich Marin | August 19, 2026August 18, 2026 by Rich Marin

Today I finally got serious about this water leak that’s been jabbing at me regularly over the last year. At first I thought it was the spa overflow valve so I kept trying to no avail to get the spa guy and the spa plumbing guy to address it. Then I got an hour-by-hour water usage run over a few weeks and noticed that this time the water loss was not when the spa was…

Business Advice Memoir

The Agony and the Ecstasy of AI

By Rich Marin | August 18, 2026 by Rich Marin

In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…

Memoir

Pages on the Calendar

By Rich Marin | August 17, 2026 by Rich Marin

An expression I have always enjoyed using in general conversation is about the passage of time. We’ve all seen movies they’re they use the visual trick of having pages of a calendar fly off or seasons pass through seasons from spring to summer to fall to winter and we are all made to feel that there are times in storytelling where one needs to show that time marches on and indeed time either changes nothing…

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