For Nathan — Dad’s First Grade

By rickColosimo / January 11, 2013 / Comments Off on For Nathan — Dad’s First Grade

  Dear Nathan,   When I was in first grade, I was 6 at the beginning of school in September and turned 7 in the middle of the year. That was in 1974. I lived in a town called Spencerport, NY, with Grandpa Tom and Grandma Katie. (Uncle Jim was not born yet!). We had…

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Incentives are sneaky

By rickColosimo / January 7, 2013 / Comments Off on Incentives are sneaky

File this under “incentives work, so think about them before you unleash the unintended consequences.” Alternatively, simplified mental models fail to capture the richness of actual reality and are therefore all broken in some way.   Maybe things like health care, crop subsidies, mortgage interest deductions, and no-doc loans are similar. Can Congress read? Is there…

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My fear looks like this

By rickColosimo / January 4, 2013 /

I wrote this back in August 2012. It needed to sit a while to take the edge off. I couldn’t even read it to edit it. -Rick   Recognizing it:  I just watched the Seattle Children’s Hospital “Stronger” video. It took me a while to recover from the emotion of the first 41 seconds. I…

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What does fear look like?

By rickColosimo / January 4, 2013 / Comments Off on What does fear look like?

We’re all afraid of things. Some real – heart attacks; some distant – terrorists; some vague – the lizard brain’s resistance to change; some too real and terrible to ever really be acknowledged. This post is about that kind of fear. Another parent (and here, “parent” is a term of art meaning a parent of a…

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