I like this quote:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Simone Weil

The more you experience real good, the closer your imagination aligns with reality

This morning, Seth Godin published something that reminded me of some ideas I've turned over in my head before:

...the rationale ... appears to be that at some point, obedience transforms into self-control. That at some point, people start obeying themselves and become leaders. Self-control is without a doubt one of the building blocks of...
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The times, they are a changin'. As they always do.

Change causes pain. Because it requires change. It requires adaptation. It requires abandoning old comforts that no longer have a foundation to stand on, finding new foundations, and building on them.

What is the role of government in times of major change? Daniel Levis wrote:...
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I started working on my taxes today. Step 1: buy

I got an email from eBay today. The subject line was "don't disappoint them - get the hottest toys".

I understand that marketers want to tap into emotions to motivate people to buy. And that's okay.

Up to a point.

Let's make eBay's message a little more explicit: "If you don't buy everything your kids...
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I got another of those emails from SpamArrest today asking me to verify that one of the emails to my mailing list wasn't spam. This time, something on SpamArrest's website struck me as ironic, if not downright hypocritical.

SpamArrest is a whitelisting service -- they block email from anyone who the recipient hasn't opted i...
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I live in Nebraska, so what I'm about to say is heresy. But we need more heretics.

I read somewhere the other day that gas that contains corn ethanol produces more greenhouse gasses than straight gasoline, and even more than other, easier to produce sources of ethanol. And we know that the growth of the...
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I saw something interesting on Amazon.com today:

That's what the price was the first time I viewed this item. The second time, it looked like this:

The third time, it was back to $6.03 + $2.95 shipping, and the original seller. At first, I didn't notice that the seller was changing, so I figured th...
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A year ago, at the end of one of my periodic political rants, I wrote:

But I have a dream. I have a dream that one day, enough people in this nation will get sick of the two major parties to vote ‘em out.

In fact, that’s a sabotage strategy I might be willing to...
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Via Slashdot:

Parents who dismiss video games as mindless entertainment with no intrinsic value for their children may not have a leg to stand on anymore thanks to science. Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have proven action based video games train people to make quick, accurate decisions...

I've experience this myself. A while...
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