My collected quotes from March.
Tim
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To start with, the Second Law implies that misfortune may be no one’s fault. The biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was to nullify the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose: that everything happens for a reason.
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Professors and bosses usually feel some sense of responsibility toward you; if you make a valiant effort and fail, they'll cut you a break. Markets are less forgiving. Customers don't care how hard you worked, only whether you solved their problems.
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An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.
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If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have to fund startups that won't leave. There are two ways to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point in their life when they naturally take root. The first approach is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups.
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Another manager familiar with the sound of cavernous cracks appearing in important structures is Arsene Wenger, who has responded to links with the Barcelona jobs by claiming he is "a football priest".
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Mourinho then added: "Do you know what your tackling looks like? No? I'll show you."
And then, Ozil writes, Mourinho tiptoed in front of Ozil with his hands close to his side with pursed lips and proceeded to hop all over the changing room.
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No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
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Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so it's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day have an edge over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has over New York.
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About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers.
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About writing software, Cuban said: "It's just math, right?" Humans will no longer be needed.
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People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves, and so really be themselves, try to make up for not thinking with doing.
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"Encouraged but not required to stand," the NFL said.
"Shall stand respectfully," U.S. Soccer now says.
Because nothing says respect like telling adult Americans exactly how they must behave during a song about freedom.
This is the same organization that failed to sanction either Tim Howard or Abby Wambach when both made not-so-thinly veiled arguments against the inclusion of foreign-born players on national teams.
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Schelin wears a message from politician Gudrun Schyman, founder of the Feminist Initiative party, which says: "Never look down on someone unless you're helping her up."
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Bruno "deserves a new opportunity as a professional," the team said in a separate post. "The club has no relation with Bruno's personal actions, nor with his past, having hired only the professional."
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The cuts came as growing numbers of viewers unsubscribed from the cable channel, even as it's paying for costly long-term TV deals with pro sports leagues.
At the time of the 2015 cuts, it was reported that ESPN was told by its parent company, Disney, to "trim $100 million from the 2016 budget and $250 million in 2017."
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Howard Aiken said "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
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If you need a loan for a car, YOU DEFINITELY CANNOT AFFORD THAT CAR...
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When I read an article about an Olympic athlete who can swim further and faster than I can even run, I don’t immediately find his blog and write a complaint that he is training too hard and failed to take into account time for commuting, chronic illnesses, or TV watching in his lifestyle.
No, when I hear about someone who is doing something better than me...I secretly try to learn from his success.
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Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.
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“I love Suarez’s over-the-top theatrics, probably cause it reminds me of his most inspired moment: when he pretended to clutch his tooth in pain after he bit Chiellini,” says Phil Podolsky.
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If it’s not cash flowing at 100% financing, then you’re essentially FORCING cash flow into the deal by paying more for financing.
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Did you ever notice how you never see a strong international trend of parents spending more time with their kids, or people canceling their TV service and reading more, or local parks and natural areas becoming increasingly flooded with parents playing with their children? Hmm.. why is this? Is it because we’ve learned that these activities are not good for our kids so we have wised up and replaced them with organized and expensive activities? Or is it because nobody is making money off of these alternative ways and nobody gets to look rich doing them, and thus the Marketing and Social Competition Engine is not tricking us into doing them?
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Several school districts across the country are closing to allow staff and teachers the chance to participate. While some people in those communities applauded district leadership for the show of solidarity, others criticized them for leaving working families scrambling to find childcare.
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Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects.
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Outrage is important, but outreach is what will create change.
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There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They've forgotten most of them. So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to have to do it yourself.
Few do.
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“If you go into a high school and ask the classroom, ‘Are cigarettes harmful? Is alcohol harmful?’ every kid raises their hands,” Gilman says. “But if I ask, ‘Is marijuana harmful?’ not a hand goes up.”
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You don't know what the ideas are until you get them down to the fewest words.
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Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor.
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When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they're not saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They're saying "He invested in Google."
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Some farmers I’ve spoken with already expect that peach tree damage occurred last weekend, and this weekend will not help. It’s part of the peril of an early spring stretch and why temperatures in the 60s and 70s, while good in the moment, are not welcome so early in the year.
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Massachusetts is the best state in America, according to a new report published Tuesday.
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Back in Engineering school, they used to teach us that every piece of real-world information comes along with an unspoken “Error Range”.
If you use the most pessimistic number for all possible decisions, you’ll end up with a bridge that is incredibly strong. On the other hand, if you design the bridge to withstand exactly the expected amount of stress, it will collapse as soon as something unexpected happens to it. Somewhere in between is a happy medium where your bridge is statistically very safe, yet not nearly as expensive as a worst-of-all-cases design.
Suddenly a culture that had been more or less united was divided into haves and have-nots. I didn't realize how united the culture had been till I saw it divided.
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But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.
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If I went to work and saw a friend with cute shoes, I’d start thinking that maybe I deserved some cute shoes too. But, instead of just going online to find a deal on cute shoes and clicking “buy”, I would wait. I would say: “If I still want this in two weeks, I will get it.”
But sure enough, I found that the two weeks would pass without me even thinking about the shoes.
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The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.
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Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States, has said many times in recent years that the most prevalent health issue in the country is not cancer or heart disease or obesity. It is isolation.
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A majority of Americans live in suburbs, a type of low-density settlement designed around universal personal automobile use. Commentators such as James Howard Kunstler argue that because over 90% of transportation in the U.S. relies on oil, the suburbs' reliance on the automobile is an unsustainable living arrangement. Peak oil would leave many Americans unable to afford petroleum based fuel for their cars, and force them to use bicycles or electric vehicles. Additional options include telecommuting, moving to rural areas, or moving to higher density areas, where walking and public transportation are more viable options. In the latter two cases, suburbs may become the "slums of the future".
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Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.
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Something bothered him. As he said later, “Hyperthyroidism is a classic cause of an irregular heart rhythm, but hyperthyroidism is an infrequent cause of an irregular heart rhythm.” Hearing that the young woman had a history of excess thyroid hormone production, the emergency room medical staff had leaped, with seeming reason, to the assumption that her overactive thyroid had caused the dangerous beating of her heart. They hadn’t bothered to consider statistically far more likely causes of an irregular heartbeat.
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You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that everyone would do this. It doesn't seem like that much extra work to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. And yet practically no one does.
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Trading a marginal tax rate for an average tax rate makes sense no matter what you think tax rates or your personal income will be in the future.
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Really, I’m just a guy sitting on the couch typing things into a computer. But because of YOU, it is a whole world of fun. So thanks very much to all.
