“If we look at the percentage of overall labour force that is self-employed,
the US ranks near the bottom among high-income countries. The likely
explanation: our lack of national health insurance.”
—Mark Weisbrot
“The ideal forum: a bunch of people who are individually working away on
their own personal projects. Each participant has a vested interest; he or
she needs to deliver results first, and is discussing it with others only
second.”
— James Hague
Q: Most people find it morbid for someone young and healthy to think about their death.
me: I can never understand that. I am accomplishment-oriented rather than experience-oriented. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense of accomplishment and impact on the world than from experiential pleasures, or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.
Exhibit A: When a group of Stanford undergraduates took a standardized test and were told that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. This is stereotype threat.
Exhibit B: Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions. One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university. Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects. This is psychological distance.
Mike Davis: More than half the human race now lives in cities. Mostly in the squalor of slums and squatter cities.
Kevin Kelly: The city is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint it generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. Discomfort is an investment. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.
Michael Balter: In Anatolia nine thousand years ago, a stone-age civilization lived in high density without cities or slums for three thousand years. (via Ken Macleod)
Chris O'Brien: Andreessen has never started or operated a profitable business, except for one year with Netscape. LoudCloud/Opsware failed to turn an annual profit in its six years as a publicly traded company.
Ben Horowitz: First, with Loudcloud we saw the whole “cloud computing” trend way before most. Second, when the dot-com bust hit, we took radical steps to reboot, something a lot of founders might have been unable to do.
A month in the life of a swordboat captain, a glimpse into the mindset needed from a leader.
“The first lesson Pythagoras's disciples learned was silence. For a time
they were required to be only hearers. "He (Pythagoras) said so" (Ipse
dixit) was to be held by them to be sufficient without proof. It was only
advanced pupils, after years of patient submission, who were allowed to ask
questions and to state objections."
— Thomas
Bullfinch, The age of fable (1855). Do we paradoxically have less
critical thought today because we are free to ask questions from day one?
