“
When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world.
And there's nothing wrong with my skills.
”
”
Jonathan Maberry (Patient Zero (Joe Ledger, #1))
“
Cockiness is a display of an empty lifestyle, humility is when you see yourself as a zero while others are making you their hero.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
If you treat your mind like a trash can, don't be surprised when you reach for a thought and all you get is garbage.
”
”
Zero Dean (Lessons Learned from The Path Less Traveled Volume 1: Get motivated & overcome obstacles with courage, confidence & self-discipline)
“
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
الفاشلون - شأنهم شأن العصاميّين - يملكون معارفَ أكثر من المُتفوّقين ، إذا كنتَ تريد أن تتفوَّق فعليك أن تعرف شيئًا بعينه ، دون إضاعة الوقت في معرفة كل شيء ؛ متعة المعرفة مخصّصة للفاشلين ، كلّما أكثرتَ مِن معرفة الأشياء ، سارت الأشياء في غير طريقها
”
”
Umberto Eco (Numero zero)
“
Its all about perception in life, For some One minus One = One & for some its Zero.That's the only difference.
”
”
Abhysheq Shukla (The Reflection "Success or Stress"Choose Wisely)
“
Talk about how various people have been “winners” in “the lottery of life” or have things that others don’t have just because they “happen to have money” is part of the delegitimizing of property as a prelude to seizing it.
Luck certainly plays a very large role in all our lives. But we need to be very clear about what that role is. Very few people just “happen” to have money. Typically, they have it because their fellow human beings have voluntarily paid them for providing some goods or services, which are valued more than the money that is paid for them. It is not a zero-sum game. Both sides are better off because of it—and the whole society is better off when such transactions take place freely among free and independent people.
Who can better decide the value of the goods and services that someone has produced than the people who actually use those goods and services—and pay for them with their own hard-earned money?
Luck may well have played a role in enabling some people to provide valuable goods and services. Others might have been able to do the same if they had been raised by better parents, taught in better schools or chanced upon someone who pointed them in the right direction. But you are not going to change that by confiscating the fruits of productivity. All you are likely to do is reduce that productivity and undermine the virtues and attitudes that create prosperity and make a free society possible.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Controversial Essays)
“
Many families actively discourage the expression of tough emotions like fear and anger. Happiness and tranquility, meanwhile, make it to the top of the list of “approved” emotions. There is no such thing as a bad emotion. There is no such thing as a good emotion. An emotion is either there—or it is not. These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude.
-They do not judge emotions.
-They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions.
-They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not.
-They see a crisis as a teachable moment.
”
”
John Medina (Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five)
“
You have got nothing. Great, start from nothing. But don't give excuses. Give passion. Give fire. Give commitment.
”
”
Hiral Nagda
“
Success is a combinational lock whose secret passcode is 0000. When negativity, anger, anxiety, and stress are set to zero, the law of attraction works at its peak.
”
”
Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
At this point, we can see that Jesus has been raised by Luke from zero to a hero.
”
”
Mwanandeke Kindembo (Sinless)
“
Reality shall reach you somewhere in between A and Z still and all creativity shall reach you anywhere in between Zero and Infinity
”
”
P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
“
No one is going to swoop down and save your life in one instance. If they do, there might be reason to be suspicious. It’s all about planting the little seeds in the heart, so you can do the changing yourself.
”
”
Billy Lawrence (Highway Zero)
“
Consider a narrow deep river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a long distance downstream.
When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam.
Surprisingly, though, when one gets within a few miles of the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is highest, as you then get closer to the dam the concern falls off to zero! That is, the people living immediately under the dam who are certain to be drowned in a dam burst profess unconcern.
That is because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while living immediately under the high dam is to deny the finite possibility that it could burst.
”
”
Jared Diamond
“
For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
Sometme later that afternoon I met a friend who was covered in gray dust and limping. I noticed he had a few small cuts on his hands, too. I asked him if he was okay and he said, "I'm walking and talking . . . I'm not bitching about anything." In retrospect, that seemed to sum up the attitude of people at Ground Zero who survived when the buildings collapsed. They might have some injuries but they had perspective.
”
”
Randy Sutton (True Blue: Police Stories by Those Who Have Lived Them)
“
there is no other civilization that can serve as support; we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as a counterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that the process of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phases with us in the West. Therefore it is not impossible that we would also be the first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves more or less in our current state, having abandoned—"superseded"—what they still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional forms of existence that attract us. The consequence would be a reversal of roles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit, would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command, very different from the material, techno-industrial leadership that it wielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a general leveling. This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may have been useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life; and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions,
”
”
Julius Evola (Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul)
“
More research has since confirmed and extended these simple findings. In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include: • a steady dose of altruistic acts • making lists of things for which you are grateful, which generates feelings of happiness in the short term • cultivating a general “attitude of gratitude,” which generates feelings of happiness in the long term • sharing novel experiences with a loved one • deploying a ready “forgiveness reflex” when loved ones slight you If
”
”
John Medina (Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five)
“
Graphic designer, Ava Dennis, gave a dead-eyed stare to her computer screen and contemplated chucking it out the window of her second-floor apartment. Twenty-seven was the number of rounds of edits she’d done for a personalized Valentine’s Day card. Four was the number of times her client, Kathy, had typed the phrase we want this card to resemble our love in emails to Ava. Zero was the number of Valentine’s Day dates Ava had been on, which was probably the reason for her questionable attitude around this time of year. You see, Ava Dennis was a victim of the Valentine’s Day Curse. Three times, she’d had a serious boyfriend
”
”
T.S. Joyce (Unlove Me)
“
Nintendo’s standards were exacting. “In terms of game testing they revolutionised the concept,” said Milgrom. “They said zero defects – we will not allow you to release a game that has any bugs in it whatsoever. Now zero defects was an unheard of concept in any other software or on any other gaming platform. Nintendo knew if they were going to sell it in the supermarkets and sell it to mums and dads it had to work off the shelf and had to be flawless. They didn’t want returns. We had to change our programming attitude and the way we developed games, which was brilliant. It was really hard work. If you had a bug in your final version you could miss Christmas because it would take a month for them to go through the testing of the title.
”
”
Tristan Donovan (Replay: The History of Video Games)
“
Also, even when people feel they know nothing, they typically know a bit and that bit should tip them away from maximum uncertainty, at least a bit. The astrophysicist J. Richard Gott shows us what forecasters should do when all they know is how long something—a civil war or a recession or an epidemic—has thus far lasted. The right thing is to adopt an attitude of “Copernican humility” and assume there is nothing special about the point in time at which you happen to be observing the phenomenon. For instance, if the Syrian civil war has been going on for two years when IARPA poses a question about it, assume it is equally likely you are close to the beginning—say, we are only 5% into the war—or close to the end—say, the war is 95% complete. Now you can construct a crude 95% confidence band of possibilities: the war might last as little as 1/39 of 2 years (or less than another month), or as long as about 39 × 2 years, or 78 years. This may not seem to be a great achievement but it beats saying “zero to infinity.” And if 78 years strikes you as ridiculously long that is because you cheated by violating the ground rule of you must know “nothing.” You just introduced outside-view base-rate knowledge about wars in general (e.g., you know that very few wars have ever lasted that long). You are now on the long road to becoming a better forecaster. See Richard Gott, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects,” Nature
”
”
Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
“
I'm not a size zero, I'll never be a size zero, and the number of fucks I give about that is zero.
”
”
Lauren Gallagher (The Virgin Cowboy Billionaire's Secret Baby)
“
Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude. In
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options.
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
Pussy-Men
Take your ugly crocs and birkenstocks
Your overpadded Thor-lo socks
Your safe SPF 50 cosmetic blocks
Your zero carbon cars and solar clocks
Your dumb plans to save the arctic fox
Your UTNE Reader and eco-stocks and
FUCK OFF!
I can't breathe, I need some air..
I'm bored to death, I've gotta switch
To a real man who pulls my hair
Who make me come and calls me bitch.
P.S. And fuck your overpriced Co-op Farmer's Market too. Produce is half-price at HEB without the snotty 'I'm an artisan' attitude. For God sakes, their fucking avocados, not the Czar's Tiffany eggs.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . .
Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . .
The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary.
And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case.
It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . .
Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . .
Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . .
Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”
Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . .
Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . .
Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts.
Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . .
If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.
”
”
Zvi Bodie
“
Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a “hollow-flexible” attitude of “beginner’s mind.” You’re right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
”
”
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
“
We cannot address new problems and never-seen-before challenges with old attitudes and outdated perspectives.
”
”
James E. Ward Jr. (Zero Victim: Overcoming Injustice With a New Attitude)
“
Your attitude toward other people can have a big effect on your health. Being lonely increases the risk of everything from heart attacks to dementia, depression and death, whereas people who are satisfied with their social lives sleep better, age more slowly and respond better to vaccines. The effect is so strong that curing loneliness is as good for your health as giving up smoking, according to John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, Illinois, who has spent his career studying the effects of social isolation.
”
”
Jeremy Webb (Nothing: Surprising Insights Everywhere from Zero to Oblivion)
“
The experience of power has no meaning aside from the other-than-self reference which sustains it. If the position of ascendancy is not acknowledged tacitly and actively by those over whom the ascendancy is exercised, then it falls flat. Hypocrisy on the part of the disinherited in dealing with the dominant group is a tribute yielded by those who are weak. But if this attitude is lacking, or is supplanted by a simple sincerity and genuineness, then it follows that advantage due to the accident of birth or position is reduced to zero. Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings. A man is a man, no more, no less. The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity.
”
”
Howard Thurman (Jesus and the Disinherited)
“
North Koreans pride themselves on their directness of speech, an attitude that had been encouraged by Kim Jong-il himself. Foreigners are often taken aback by the bluntness of North Korean diplomats. Ok-hee’s experience was the first hint I got that the two Koreas had diverged into quite separate cultures. Worse was to come. After more than sixty years of division, and near-zero exchange, I would find that the language and values I thought North and South shared had evolved in very different directions. We were no longer the same people.
”
”
Hyeonseo Lee (The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story)
“
What made New Jack City work is that I showed up with zero attitude. I was a wide-eyed rookie, a sponge, trying to soak it up and willing to learn from everybody. I didn’t know shit about hitting marks or character motivation—all this acting
”
”
Ice-T (Split Decision: Life Stories)
“
There are many things in life you have zero control over. You can’t force your husband to change, you can’t prevent a storm from happening, and you can’t control how other people feel. All you can control is your effort and your attitude and your truth. When you put your energy into the things you can control, you’ll be much more effective.
”
”
Laura Whitmore (No One Can Change Your Life Except For You)
“
As for algorithms, they are not predictions, nor some kind of magic, nor reading stars and horoscopes, nor any of the superstitions, but rather they are something else, more scientific than all our sciences. Just give them the basic information, and once they have identified what is required, follow it, they put into your hands the identity that it does not know about itself, in the form of graphs on the imaginary timeline, its feelings, attitudes, psychological fluctuations, thoughts, everything about it, with astonishing accuracy, as well as general expectations. They have predicted everything accurately, not just human emotions, though these are the most serious things that they have presented.
Before they could connect them in the form of supercomputer systems, they were giving results, in a primitive way, as if they were a magic crystal from the centuries of darkness, they soon discovered that magic does not exist in them, but rather they are a crystal made of a huge number of tiny optical fibers, made of a material that there is no equal to it on earth.
Somehow, they kept inside them all the cosmic events, everything, from the motions of galaxies, and explosions, to the flapping of the wings of a butterfly, linked together by non-mathematical equations, something we do not know, incomprehensible symbols, they could not decipher, but they were able to interpret their sequence of results as algorithms.
”
”
Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
“
personal privacy. That debate, a quaint twentieth-century one, is just ignorant background noise: the right to privacy is gone, lost already, or at least so compromised it’s really worthless. No, the real present and future threat is manipulation, the inculcation of prescribed attitudes and modes of behavior into an unwitting citizenry, the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.
”
”
Anthony McCarten (Going Zero)
“
Learn to admire others; it is the first step to overcome your ego.”
“The ego destroys its egoist silently and suddenly, as a termite does.”
“The ego is such a bullet that fires all your relations.”
“The ego and vanity both hold such invisible fire that flames upon oneself.”
“Your ego may hurt and damage you more than others.”
Learn how to live and participate in people and society, how to help each other, and how to build harmony and peace among those who have lost their way. It can only be with respect, justice, and equality, without any distinctions. Be aware that your ego can destroy your ability if you focus on your caliber and status; it is a poison, not a remedy. Understand the outcomes and consequences of ego, egoists, and egotism. Read thoroughly to grasp the insight to enlighten your life and ways.
“Everyone stands firm with their ego status; thus, I accept that I am zero and that everyone else is a hero, but remember that on every count, zero matters.”
“The ego, vanity, jealousy, and other flaws define the imperceptive attitude and fly silently toward self-victimizing.”
“Nothing else than the worst and abysmal self-defeat, which elucidates that one fetches and embraces itself to become the victim of ego, vanity, and jealousy.”
“An egoist focuses on self-promotion and does not admire others or value anyone else. Unfortunately, such one remains the prisoner of egotism.”
“A heart that contains love cannot keep the hate there
A heart that performs forgiveness does not recognize revenge
In a heart where there is altruism, there is no place for egoism
Such a heart demonstrates a pure and real human.”
“It proves not a difficult task if one discovers the universe; however, discovering one’s self-ego is the toughest matter, whereas overcoming that leads to a visionary victory.”
“To show others, the quotes and sayings of the visionary figures, as a mirror instead of reform own conduct and character, indicates one’s worst egoism unless that reflects and demonstrates not their golden words.”
“One can neither understand nor accept and respect others’ logic, view, and insight before overcoming their ego.”
“After the jumping out of your ego, you liberate your own, and you see the way towards the values of others.”
“The nurturing of morals is the language, and control of the ego is the eye of the soul.”
“Surrender your ego to enjoy peace of mind and the beauty of equality and harmony.”
“Everyone stands firm with their ego status; thus, I accept that I am zero and that everyone else is a hero, but remember that on every count, zero matters.”
“Hatred, racism, discrimination, distinction, and vainglory germinate in the soil of ego.”
“When one becomes capable of overcoming desires, hopes, and ego, one learns and understands the faculty of patience.”
I Yield Not
***
I suffer not from ego
I let that not enter my life
I yield not my will to avaricious
As I am a truth of truths
I dream not, impossibilities
I become a dream of my dreams
Since I exist as a reality
Thus, it builds
A sweet and lovely pleasure,
Peace and calm
I dance; I dance
Without security
Even no one can imagine
My link to the spiritual world
I am here and there
No one is aware
I wear and bear
Every atmosphere.
Deliberately
***
I deliberately
Become fool
I enjoy that
To punish
My ego
It is not strange
Nor it is a surprise
It is just an idea
Of yourself
What are you
Who are you
If my ego rules me
I feel myself in the doom
If I overcome my ego
My ways become bright
I see the destiny
For that, I am here
I deliberately
Become fool
To let people
Enjoy and happy
Let them heal
Their wounds
Caused by themselves
Of their wrong deeds
I deliberately
Become fool
To make the people active
Put to use their time
The great lessons
That nowhere
One can learn.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
Cue thousands of Instagram posts encouraging the no-contact rule and implicitly shaming anyone who continues a relationship with their ex. But the story of relationships and their endings is far too complex for us to apply solution-focused changes aimed at reducing pain. Still, every one of my friends and every therapist on Instagram advises against talking to an ex. No contact, cold turkey, zero—a crazy idea to me. In my work, I’ve noticed that more than half of my clients will continue to communicate with their former partner, maintaining some form of connection. Even a friendship. This happens despite the discouraging advice recommending a complete cutoff. But we, as a society, might be better off trying to understand our need to continue a connection with an ex than condemning or strongly advising against it. Maybe it’s time we reconsidered our attitude toward post-breakup connections. Instead of dismissing them as unhealthy, we could try to understand the motives behind our choice to stay in touch. After all, each relationship and breakup is unique, and the two (or more) people involved in a ruptured relationship are in the best position to judge what serves their emotional needs and personal growth. The idea of cutting an ex out of your life completely is also extremely heteronormative. Many queer people (like me) don’t have their family of origin to fall back on. Our “families” are therefore sometimes our friends, partners, and ex-partners, the people we form deep connections with. Alex was my family for ten years. So, for me, cutting him out of my life entirely wasn’t so simple.
”
”
Todd Baratz (How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind: Forget the Fairy Tale and Get Real)
“
Ever wonder why lawyers, as a group, are so miserable? Some social scientists have—and they’ve offered three explanations. One involves pessimism. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It’s also a detriment in most professions. But as Martin Seligman has written, “There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer.11 A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose. But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all—and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little “decision latitude.” Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it.
”
”
Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
“
But today it’s possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startups’ indefinite approach to business in general. Most of the people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few want to commit to a specific company with the level of intensity necessary for success. It starts with the professors who often become part-time consultants instead of full-time employees—even for the biotech startups that begin from their own research. Then everyone else imitates the professors’ indefinite attitude. It’s easy for libertarians to claim that heavy regulation holds biotech back—and it does—but indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.
”
”
Franklin Foer (World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech)
“
The ripple effect of their new attitude transferred to their customer interactions, improving the customers’ experience with the company, increasing repeat and referral business, which increased everyone’s pride. That simple change over the period of eighteen months did a complete 180 on the company culture. Net profits grew by more than 30 percent during that time, utilizing the same staff and zero additional investment in marketing.
”
”
Darren Hardy (The Compound Effect)
“
Sam Anderson. “The Greatest Novel.” New York Magazine (outline). Jan. 9, 2011. New York is, famously, the everything bagel of megalopolises—one of the world’s most diverse cities, defined by its churning mix of religions, ethnicities, social classes, attitudes, lifestyles, etc., ad infinitum. This makes it a perfect match for the novel, a genre that tends to share the same insatiable urge. In choosing the best New York novel, then, my first instinct was to pick something from the city’s proud tradition of megabooks—one of those encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York. Something like, to name just a quick armful or two, Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—or possibly even one of the tradition’s more modest recent offspring, like Lush Life and Let the Great World Spin. In the end, however, I decided that the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite of all of those: a relatively small book containing absolutely zero diversity. There are no black or Hispanic or Asian characters, no poor people, no rabble-rousers, no noodle throwers or lapsed Baha’i priests or transgender dominatrixes walking hobos on leashes through flocks of unfazed schoolchildren. Instead there are proper ladies behaving properly at the opera, and more proper ladies behaving properly at private balls, and a phlegmatic old Dutch patriarch dismayed by the decline of capital-S Society. The book’s plot hinges on a subtly tragic love triangle among effortlessly affluent lovers. It is 100 percent devoted to the narrow world of white upper-class Protestant heterosexuals. So how can Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possibly be the greatest New York novel of all time?
”
”
Anonymous
“
Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude. In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
“
Is a lukewarm attitude to one’s work a sign of mental health? Is a merely professional attitude the only sane approach?
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
When people take the short lifetime of an animal, filled with suffering and abuse, rape and mutilation, humiliation and commodification, and reduce all that down to "meat", this is such an incredibly selfish attitude, filled with arrogance and apathy towards the animal in question.
You'll often hear such people cry "freedom of choice", while at the same time depriving these animals of any "freedom" throughout the entirety of their lives. Beings who are given zero "choice" in the matter. At the merciless hands of consumer demand, they will have their tails docked, their ears clipped, their beaks cut off, their testicles twisted and pulled off, searing hot irons pushed into the sides of their bodies(all without anaesthetics). They'll be sexually violated, have their babies stolen, their movements restricted, forced to live lives of anguish, despair and torment. They'll suffer long, arduous journeys, In cramped conditions, with nothing to drink or eat, until finally they are prodded, kicked and shocked along a production line that ends in,bolts to their heads (often ineffective), and knives to their throat, scalding water or even the gas chamber. All so that these people can gratify themselves with the fleeting, perverse pleasure of their secretions (milk and eggs) or the slayed animal's butchered fried flesh.
The same people will cry out for "respect", while simultaneously fully disrespecting and disregarding the lives of others that they will do their utmost to downplay and ignore.
”
”
Mango Wodzak