Friday, February 10, 2017

talking shits, january 2017

Hi all,

One new thing I started doing this year was collecting quotes from my non-book reading. I do not have a plan beyond that at the moment- no analysis, no connecting, no blog posts. For now, I'm just collecting.

I thought it might be interesting to share about one to two thousand words of these every month. The second Friday of the following month seems about the right time.

So, below is the first sample of these quotes. All of them are from something I read during January.

Unless, of course, it's something I cooked up myself. Those are easy to identify- no capitalization, no punctuation.

For everything else, you can probably find the source of the quote by copying and pasting the example in full into a Google search. Some of these link to interesting articles and some do not.

Thanks for reading. See you again on Sunday.

Tim

******

perhaps the biggest obstacle to finding meaning is the search for it.

---

"There’s a clear distinction between American and European parents...American parents don’t like play experiences where they have to step in and help their kids a lot. They want their kids to be able to play by themselves. We see among European parents, it’s okay to sit on the floor and spend time with the kids."

---

If you have one ass, you cannot sit on two horses.

---

It generally works like this: the venture capitalists (who are mostly white men) don’t really know what they’re doing with any certainty—it’s impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing—so they bet a little bit on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say “Yo!” (and only “Yo!”) to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world...The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to call bullshit.

---

All managers make mistakes—it’s Klopp’s ability to admit and address them that sets him apart. And yet, not once has he publicly criticised any of these players. In fact, he’s openly supported them.

---

But, initially, choose only one thing and do that one thing until it becomes habitual. Maurer suggests thirty days.

It almost seems too simple; so simple that you might think that you are effecting little to no change. But these changes are additive. Imagine if every month for a year you added a healthy habit to your life.

---

If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.

---

If you don’t have a system or you don’t have a belief of what you want to become as a team, as a leader, as the head coach, then it becomes very difficult for you to communicate that to the players. Then all of a sudden you become an independent contractor, and you have a bunch of independent contractors working for you.

---

What do the best teams in the world have in common? Generally, it’s a one-club mentality. That the same exercises, the same style drops all the way down.

---

“The toilet is the biggest waste of water in your house,” says Kenneth Messer. “There’s nothing else in your house that will dump nearly two gallons of water in as short a period of time.”

---

...such a philosophy does save 2,565 gallons per year per person...but as a purely financial move, it’s just not worth the $7 to me.

---

Look for opportunities where you can interview people. Every year, there are fewer and fewer people who are able to do this.

---

It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent.

---

Our hero Rocky Balboa travels to Moscow to take on Ivan Drago, a Russian who murders his opponents and employs a team of computer experts to help achieve his goals. Really, would it be the worst thing in the world for Rocky to have a good relationship with Drago? They could team up to fight terrorists.

---

On the night of January 24, 1887, flames erupted from the iron foundry in South Boston, spewing smoke over the South Bay. Before firemen could reach the inferno, local resident Tommy MaGuire climbed a ladder to the roof and, as legend has it, “undertook to fight the flames with his fists.” I’d tell you the rest of the story but it would spoil the next Mark Wahlberg movie.

---

i found (a) difference between framing it as "let's improve from 80 to 85 percent" instead of "let's cut the error down from 20 to 15 percent"...

---

Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing of significance.

---

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name

---

"Paper Planes" lyrics provided for educational purposes and personal use only.

---

Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.

---

In Aristotle’s description of good temper, he encourages us to err in the direction of “making allowances”.

---

This is one of the persistent questions in life — how to separate the copycats and mimics from the real deal.

I’ve been collecting little heuristics over the years.

*The ability to walk you through things step by step, without requiring great leaps.
*They spent a lot of time reading.
*Intelligent people normally get excited when you ask them why or how, whereas mimics normally get frustrated.
*They can argue the other side of an idea better than the people that disagree with them.
*They know how to focus and typically create large chunks of time.
*They’ve failed.

---

Who can best tell the difference between a Coral Snake and its Mimics? It’s a Coral Snake itself. The real thing knows a fake.

---

“The latest executive orders and statements by the president are a direct attack on Boston’s people, Boston’s strength and Boston’s values.”

---

Coomer is part of the majority of America -- specifically 54% -- that has $0 invested in the stock market, as Bankrate found in a survey last year.

---

If you stop and consider the pros and cons, you will find reasons not to pursue it further.

---

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

---

"There's a new movie out about a person with DID. It's a thriller/horror movie," her patient wrote, referring to M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie. "Do I ever scare you?"

---

Trump enters office as the least popular new president since the invention of polling. Yet he insists, and maybe he believes, that he has ridden into Washington on the back of a mass movement the likes of which America has never seen. The activist Left enters this era having managed to lose a national election to Donald Trump. Yet it behaves as though it takes itself to be the obviously rightful voice of both reason and the masses. Both seem persuaded that they would be even more popular if only they were more like what they already are.

---

We have a certain heroic expectation of how medicine works. Heart attacks could be stopped; cancers could be cured. It was like discovering that water could put out fire. We built our health-care system, accordingly, to deploy firefighters. Doctors became saviors.

---

Primary care, it seemed, does a lot of good for people—maybe even more good, in the long run, than I will as a surgeon. But I still wondered how. What, exactly, is the primary-care physician’s skill?

---

“I think the hardest transition...to my practice as a primary-care physician was feeling comfortable with waiting...the biggest struggle is trusting that patients will call if they are getting worse.”

---

They want us to believe that they can recognize problems before they happen, and that, with steady, iterative effort over years, they can reduce, delay, or eliminate them. Yet incrementalists also want us to accept that they will never be able to fully anticipate or prevent all problems. This makes for a hard sell.

---

He heard there was a blizzard outside but couldn’t see it himself. Then a nurse smuggled him a snowball and allowed him to hold it. This was against hospital regulations, and this was Miller’s point: There are parts of ourselves that the conventional health care system isn’t equipped to heal or nourish, adding to our suffering.

---

In this era of advancing information, it will become evident that, for everyone, life is a preexisting condition waiting to happen. We will all turn out to have a lurking heart condition or a tumor or a depression or some rare disease that needs to be managed.

---

Without the Affordable Care Act’s protections requiring all insurers to provide coverage to people regardless of their health history and at the same price as others their age, he’d be unable to find health insurance. Republican replacement plans threaten to weaken or drop these requirements, and leave no meaningful solution for people like him. And data indicate that twenty-seven per cent of adults under sixty-five are like him, with past health conditions that make them uninsurable without the protections.