Well, hello Apexians. I apologize for not publishing a round-up yesterday. As I mentioned earlier this week, I somehow lost all of the links I’d collected to share with you, which meant I had to start over from scratch. Not a problem except that I had planned a Very Busy Tuesday for myself. As a result, I never found time to re-gather stories for Wednesday!
No matter! Here it is Wednesday morning, and I’m pulling together material for Thursday and Friday. And you know what? I finally made time to review your suggestions for new sources. I’ve added them all to my feed reader, so they should show up soon in curation. Like…today! 😉
The great divergence. [Strong Money Australia] — “If the FIRE movement has proven anything, it’s that amassing wealth and living with greater freedom is now possible for the average middle class person. This simply wasn’t possible for most of human history. All it takes is learning, action, and consistent effort. A willingness to do things differently from others is the key.” [This is a long, meandering, ranting post but it’s well written and I enjoyed it.]
“Most people rely on parents for material support into adulthood. [Science Daily] — “A new study finds that only a third of adults in the United States did not rely on their parents for some form of material support between their late teens and early 40s.”
More millennials are signing prenups. [Axios] — “Half of U.S. adults say they’re open to signing a prenup, according to new data — preconceived notions about romance and matrimony be damned. More fiancés (millennials in particular) want to protect their assets before they tie the knot by signing prenups, contracts previously linked to only the rich and famous.”
I’m going to end today with an article that has nothing to do with money but everything to do with my favorite subject: animal intelligence. The New York Times Magazine recently published a piece called “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” [free gift article], which explores research that shows animals communicate. With language.
I know a lot of people think I’m crazy when I argue that animals are just as smart as people, that they have rich internal lives. We, as a species, have come to believe that we are unique. We’re not. More and more, research proves this. It’s just that for so many years — millennia! — we haven’t taken the time and effort to actually try to understand the animals around us. Now that we’re doing so, scientists are finding that we’ve been far too anthropocentric in our views.
Anyhow, this is an interesting story and a good read.
(Do you really want to hear how crazy I am? I’ve been arguing that animals are intelligent for decades. I have a broken website about animal intelligence that I really ought to revive because there is so much research about this lately. But the older I get — and this is the potentially crazy part — the more I begin to believe that plants are intelligent too. And insects. There have been a couple of recent articles about insect intelligence, and believe it or not there are many books — and lots of research — into plant intelligence. My best summary of it is that J.R.R. Tolkien came close to capturing plants when he created the Ents.)
Okay, I guess that should have been a post at my personal blog hahah. And maybe it will be.
I’ll be back tomorrow with more great stuff about money…and smart vegetables.