Warren Buffett says public speaking is the single best investment you can ever make

Public-speaking skills will set you apart.

As graduate of Toastmasters Competent Communicator program I can confirm that Buffet’s recommendations are correct. That program changed my life.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has offered investment wisdom for five decades at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder’s meeting. Buffett didn’t disappoint the 40,000 shareholders who attended this year’s meeting, often turning questions about the stock market into tips for a successful life.

During the six-hour question and answer period, Buffett was asked twice to name the single best investment he would recommend today as a hedge, or protection, against inflation. While the two people who asked the questions expected a stock tip, Buffett gave what he considered a far more valuable opinion.

“I’ll tell you something even better than one stock,” Buffett said.

“The best investment–by far–is developing yourself.”

If you are exceptionally good at something, people will beat a path to your door, says the 91-year-old investor. If you develop the skills that others are willing to pay for, you’ll thrive despite what’s happening in the broader economy. According to Buffett, “your abilities can’t be inflated away from you.”

For years, Buffett hosted business school students who made a pilgrimage to his office in Omaha to meet with him. The students were often surprised when Buffett showed off his most prized diploma–a framed certificate from a public-speaking course.

“I have one diploma hanging in my office,” Buffett would tell them. “It’s from a Dale Carnegie course which cost me a hundred bucks back in 1951. It’s incalculable how much value I got from that hundred dollars.”

There’s nothing like working to improve your own skills, Buffett said. He then added, “I would say communications skills are the first area I would work on to enhance your value throughout life, no matter what you do, because if you can’t talk to people, you’ll have a real problem selling anything–stocks or anything else.”

California Abortion Law

This will get the attention of those wanting to stop abortions.

California guarantees the right to abortion in statute and the state constitution. It covers the cost of abortion for lower-income Californians on Medi-Cal, and also requires private insurance to cover it. And the state has rejected the idea of requiring waiting periods or parental consent for abortion.

If the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, a pregnant person can seek an abortion for any reason.

After viability, only if continuing the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the pregnant person.

It’s up to a physician’s “good faith medical judgement” — in practicality, most doctors consider a fetus viable at 24 weeks or once a fetus weighs 500 grams.

My source for this information is Cal Matters. 

Once Roe vs Wade is overturned those seeking an abortion will be coming to California if their state bans abortions.

The West is Facing a Drought

It appears I was ahead of the curve in anticipating a major water shortage in Los Angeles.  I cut watering my lawns to one day a week over the past two months. MWD wants a 35% reduction in consumption. My reduced watering resulted in a 30% reduction.  The lawns are now half brown.  Hot summers will likely mean a dead or very brown grass during the hot summer months.

While MWD brings water from northern California to Southern California the other project brining water here is from the Colorado River.  That river is running dry too.  The water is so low there that the intake valves below Hoover Dam can now be seen.  Lake Powell on that river, the country’s second-largest reservoir, is drying up.  If water levels at the lake were to drop another 32 feet, all hydroelectricity production would be halted at the reservoir’s Glen Canyon Dam.

Interestingly a desalination facility in Orange County California is being opposed by environmentalists.  

Israel halts for Holocaust day, honors 6 million Jews killed

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Sirens blared across Israel early Thursday as the country came to a standstill in an annual ritual honoring the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

People halted where they were walking, and drivers stopped their cars to get out of the vehicles as people bowed their heads in memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide. Ceremonies were planned throughout the day at Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, parliament and elsewhere.

Israel was founded in 1948 as a sanctuary for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. About 165,000 survivors live in Israel, a dwindling population that is widely honored but struggling with poverty.

Ushering in Holocaust memorial day at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett late Wednesday called on the world to stop comparing the Holocaust to other events in history. He spoke after the presidents of both Ukraine and Russia drew parallels between their ongoing war and the genocide during World War II.

“As the years go by, there is more and more discourse in the world that compares other difficult events to the Holocaust. But no,” he said. “No event in history, cruel as it may have been, is comparable to the extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators.”

He also warned the country against allowing its deep differences to tear the nation apart. The speech, coming on one of Israel’s most solemn days of the year, came in a deeply personal context as well. On Tuesday, his family received a letter with a live bullet and a death threat. Israeli authorities tightened security around the premier and his family and were investigating.

“My brothers and sisters, we cannot, we simply cannot allow the same dangerous gene of factionalism dismantle Israel from within,” Bennett said.

Israel makes great effort to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust and make heroes of those who survived. Restaurants and places of entertainment remain closed on Holocaust memorial day, radios play somber music and TV stations devote their programming to documentaries and other Holocaust-related material..

For them, challenges loom. This year’s ceremony comes as Israel and much of the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic, which confronted Holocaust survivors in particular with increased health risks as well as widespread loneliness and despair.

Additionally, about a third of Israel’s Holocaust survivors live below the poverty line, with many sustained by government stipends and donations, according to a group that represents survivors.

Despite their experience and widespread education programs, antisemitism rose worldwide during the pandemic, according to a report released Wednesday.

It pinned the fuel for the anti-Jewish surge on lockdowns, social media and a backlash against Israel’s punishing air raids on the Gaza Strip during last year’s 11-day war.

In addition to speeches by Bennett, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and others, Wednesday’s ceremony featured survivors lighting six torches — for the 6 million murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. The speaker of Germany’s parliament, Baerbel Bas, also attended as a special guest.

Aston Martin Executive Says Electric Cars Aren’t Viable

Finally at least one auto executive agrees with me!

Aston Martin Creative Officer Marek Reichman had some interesting things to say about electric cars and the future of the auto industry lately. In an interview with Drive, the automotive executive opined that electrification is “not the answer” for a zero-emissions future. Normally, such concerns are just dismissed by EV fanboys as “anti-progress” or “technophobia” but Reichman and his comments aren’t so easily dismissed.

Instead of completely writing off EVs, Reichman views them as a bridge to something that’s actually viable. In the interview he pointed out some of the obvious limits of electrification, such as ridiculously long charge times (anything above 5 minutes counts as too long) and the rare nature of minerals used to manufacture batteries. Considering millions of cars are made every year and EVs constitute a small drop in the bucket, he has a point.

Never Again

“Never again” is a phrase or slogan which is associated with the Holocaust and other genocides.

A large sculpture stands in front of Dachau. Located just outside Munich, it was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi regime. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, it was used by the paramilitary SS Schutzstaffel to imprison, torture and kill political opponents of the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.

Six Million Jews were killed by the Nazis.  Hitler’s intent was to kill all Jews in the world. It was a genocide.  The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention defines it as, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” And there are many other genocidal acts unfolding in countries around the globe, right now, of which you may be unaware.

The world is bearing witness to the deliberate murder of Ukrainian civilians, for one reason and one reason only: that they were Ukrainian. When you are killed, tortured, or kidnapped, as part of an organized effort, simply for being a member of an identifiable group, that is genocide.     

NATO nations are to filled with fear to standup to Vladimir Putin.  That is how bullies dominate.

In other words “never again” is an unenforceable slogan because actions speak louder than words. Putin has proven that fact.