bodr's submitted quotes
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
(...)
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything.
If Christmas were a government program, the Citizens Against Government Waste would classify the entire $66 billion in annual expenditure as "waste".
If the giver`s goal is to change behavior, it`s not enough to give the healthy thing - bran, let`s say - that you want them to eat. You also must give more bran than the recipient currently eats, that is, when he`s getting by without a grant. Any amount of bran he`s already eating - up to the amount of the grant - becomes cash, since he can substitute the gift bran for purchased bran, freeing up cash for anything else he might buy.
Buyers normally choose things they correctly expect to enjoy using. But not at Christmas. As a result, the massive holiday spending has the potential to do a terrible job matching products with users.
Christmas giving is something that people need to get out of the way, not something people wish they could do more of, if only they were richer. Christmas gift giving, pardon the metaphor, is a cross that we must bear.
High-income people spend a lot more than do average people on education and retirement savings. If we were trying to get clues about good gifts from what the rich do, then we should give people education and future consumption.
It's much easier to become interested in others than it is to convince them to be interested in you.
Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes.
Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature... In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole. Just as the factory farming system that produces and delivers our food shapes what we eat, the dynamics of our media shape what information we consume.
The Internet is going to be like a huge vise that takes the globalization system... and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day.
If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
The word media, after all, comes from the Latin for "middle layer." It sits between us and the world; the core bargain is that it will connect us to what's happening but at the price of direct experience.
We`re used to thinking of the Web as a series of one-to-one relationships. [...] But behind the scenes, the Web is becoming increasingly integrated. Businesses are realizing that it`s profitable to share data.