From Hegel’s Dialectics, an object that is what it is not. Slavoj Žižek describes the concept in a joke, a person goes to a coffee stand and asks for coffee without milk. The barista says, “Sorry, we only have coffee without cream”. In reality, both are the same coffee, but they are also different because of what they are lacking (coffee, cream).
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Having ‘good taste’ is difficult to define. Taste is subjective, it is only confirmed by assent from others (from Immanual Kant) a kind of determinate negation.
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Bond Management Is a Negative Art
Since gains from bond trading are capped by the yield at maturity, but only returns if the bond pays out, the value generated is not from what you buy but what you exclude—avoiding bonds that don’t pay out i.e. the losses you don’t take.
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You Can’t Wake up If You Don’t Fall Asleep
Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest movie, is a movie about a play where the plot never quite make sense. There is a scene where the playwright is asking a room of actors to be asleep. The movie returns to this moment a few times. On the final time, the director, after telling the lead actor there are no answers for why he burned his hand on purpose, tells everyone “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”