Category: Quote
Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
Thomas Edison
If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, every one who hears a good sentence, would immediately consider how it does any way touch his own private concern, every one would find, that it was not so much a good saying, as a severe lash to the ordinary stupidity of his own judgment: but men receive the precepts and admonitions of truth, as directed to the common sort, and never to themselves; and instead of applying them to their own manners, do only very ignorantly and unprofitably commit them to memory.
Anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who’s now alive, or no one at all.
if you drink 32 ounces of Coca-Cola, you’ll rack up 388 calories. A 20 ounce Iced White Chocolate Mocha from Starbucks has 500. Both aren’t good for you, but the Mocha’s worse. The difference is that the kinds of people who want to use government to save ignorant Americans from the harms of soft drinks are the kinds of people prefer an Iced White Chocolate Mocha to a Coca-Cola.
Coolness and attention not correlated with importance We live in a world where we pay more attention to an app that adds a fake nostalgia to our photos than the builders of the roads we travel, electricity we consume and food we eat.
We live in a world where a Lady Gaga gets as many media mentions in a day as all the Nobel laureates put together, in a year. That should alone disabuse you of the notion: "cool = valuable, cool=important or cool = good".
The way we perceive cool is biased against the old, big & expected. We have already taken granted our infrastructure.Now we are taking granted stuff such as quick/relevant information & smart mobile interfaces. Thus, even Apple & Google are seen a lot less cooler today than they were 10 years ago. 5 years ago, your iPhone would have generated an "Oh wow" reaction. Now, it is just "Oh". Public moves on really quickly. That means it is a losing game to chase the "cool".
For Microsoft, enterprise is its main revenue generator and its customers find the products valuable before writing their checks. That is the only thing that matters.
Read Quote of Balaji Viswanathan's answer to Microsoft: Why isn't Microsoft 'cool'?
So the next time you hear a good story about why the financial recession, or any other economically significant event, was caused by a single collection of bad actors — or how a simple linear narrative “explains” an important event — remember this: Just as we are wired to like a diet rich in fats and sugars, we have an appetite for simple, coherent narratives. Neither habit is good for our long-term health.
via Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth – Bloomberg
Haiti backers heralded some good news Monday for the earthquake ravaged Haiti: 44 miles of newly asphalted road, a new 605-acre industrial park in the north that will attract 65,000 jobs and a marquee hotel brand [Marriott].
“This is a very special day. It is truly a day of change,” Luis Alberto Moreno, the head of the Inter-American Development Bank said Monday.
The bank, which invests hundreds of millions of dollars in Haiti, is sponsoring a two-day investment forum in Port-au-Prince beginning Tuesday. So far, 1,000 people have registered, 500 of them business people from 29 countries.
Here is more .
