From my perspective, the Greenville’s History: A city built by immigrants article in Greenville Journal really provides a wonderful perspective on Greenville as well as the entire Upstate region of South Carolina.

In today’s political world, immigration is often discussed negatively, mostly in terms of what it costs. Greenville’s history makes the opposite case. The storefronts, the churches, the neighborhoods and the downtown we brag about were built by people who came here from somewhere else, and they built them while being told they did not belong. Unless you were Cherokee, someone in your family immigrated here.

How Housing Prices and Incomes Changed in the U.S. Between 1985 and 2025 Visual Capitalist used data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Motio Research to compare median sale prices of new homes to median annual incomes. While this draws an interesting comparison, it doesn’t truly represent a more localized comparison. For instance, it is generally understood that someone moving from the northeast will find housing prices in the south less than the home they are moving from.

From my Morning Brew email newsletter this morning: “Google Maps updated the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for users in the US, following President Trump’s executive order last week.” I certainly hope this is due to some legal parameter, otherwise I’m extremely disappointed in Google Maps. I also find a certain amount of irony in that the current government administration wastes resources, time and money on stuff like this while talking about contolling government expenses and waste.

Do you know these folks in your work/school/social life?

The first talked about himself a lot, jumping in on other people’s stories to tell his own slightly better version of whatever had just been said. His colleagues let him, but their faces had gone politely blank, the look people wear when they’re waiting for something to end. The second was his opposite: warm and pleasant whenever someone spoke to him, but only when someone spoke to him. He gave brief answers, handed the floor straight back, and initiated nothing. It was the third who intrigued me the most, because he was the one the whole group kept reorienting toward. What stood out was the way he moved attention around the group, asking questions and handing the floor to different people, while being just as comfortable taking it himself, telling his own stories without waiting to be asked. When he spoke, the same faces that had gone blank for the first guy came back to life. People leaned in. And even when someone else had asked the question, they would answer while looking at him. He came across as the “leader” of the group, even though he seemed to be on a similar professional rank with his colleagues.

The 2 behaviors that make you socially magnetic - Big Think

I am currently reading The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen: 83 1/4 Years Old. The book is a fictional diary of an elderly gentlemen living in a care home in Amsterdam. The book includes the wit and wisdom of this elderly gentleman as he observes the characters, happenings and world around him.

As I move into my own retirement, I felt particularly connected to the story by the following text:

I, Hendrikus Gerardus Groen, am ever the civil, ingratiating, courteous, polite, and helpful guy. Not because I really am all those things, but because I don’t have the balls to act differently. I rarely say what I want to say. I tend to choose the path of least confrontation. My specialty: wanting to please everybody. My parents showed foresight in naming me Hendrik: you can’t get any blander than that. I’ll wind up spiraling into depression, I thought. That’s when I made the decision to give the world a little taste of the real Hendrik Groen. I hereby declare that in this diary I am going to give the world an uncensored exposé: a year in the life of the inmates of a care home in North Amsterdam.

Well okay, maybe I’m not going to be quite that bold, but I do plan to express my thoughts, feelings and opinions more openly going forward in life. And this blog is just the start of that.

Every August, a new wave of freshmen hauls boxes into dorm rooms, buzzing with nerves and excitement. But beneath the excitement lingers a bigger question: is college still worth it? Between rising tuition and a shifting job market, students and families are weighing the cost of a degree against its long-term payoff more carefully than ever.Pew Research: Public views on the value of a college degree - May 2024

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