Human Theses

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The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us—to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them—is the greatest harm of all.

— Bruce Schneier, in his post, “Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security”

Tags: TSA security terrorism freedom rights

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You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact; and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

— Steve Jobs

Tags: change leadership agency development vision

Tell: An Intimate History of Gay Men in the Military

A poignant quote from among the many interviews of gay servicemen, past and present:

“In order for you to be protected by ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it would require such a level of deceit and deception and such a removal of everything that is beautiful in your life—of relationships, of meaning, of friendships. You would have to have no gay friends, no friends that knew you were gay, no friends who understood what it was like to be you. That’s not human and shouldn’t be asked of anyone, especially not of our service members”

Tags: gay rights policy humanity

Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle in the USA

Or: “How chasing short-term cost savings through outsourcing part after part leads to loss of expertise and production capability on the whole—for the long term.”

(Read the full article, then apply this new knowledge to your career, your company, your community and your nation.)

Tags: craft economics production expertise globalism

The Inventor of the World Wide Web, on Net Neutrality

An excerpt from a New Statesman Interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web:

For Berners-Lee, communication holds the most promise of solving all of our trickiest problems. When I ask him what he is most proud of achieving, he says: “That the World Wide Web is an open platform. I’m pleased that it was designed very cleanly so that programs can talk to each other across the net. It means that there is one information space where you can put everything. I am chuffed to bits when someone tells me, for example, that they found some medical information online that has really helped their life.”

His greatest fear is that the opposite might happen - that the web could be killed off by a large company or government. “That is why I campaign for commercial net neutrality,” he says. “If large corporations control our access to the internet and determine which websites we can go to, we will lose its openness and its democratic nature. We can all help to campaign for the right to connect. It is essential that we keep the space open as a white sheet of paper that anyone can use, without being spied on, blocked and diverted.”

Tags: technology society net neutrality internet

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I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

— Warren Buffet, in his New York Times opinion piece, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich”

Tags: Tax Policy Investment Deficit Reduction

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Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings. What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days?

— Mark Cuban, in his post What Business is Wall Street In?

Tags: finance markets

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The history of design is people building upon each others’ good ideas.

— Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, being interviewed at Wired Business Conference about Instructables joining Autodesk [video]

Tags: innovation patents iteration ideas

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You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

Tags: perspective

The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture

The 24-hour news media need to work out a better way to balance demand for facts (from interested viewers) with the inherent lack of information surrounding a still-developing story. Filling would-be dead air with conjecture or assumption can hardly be called journalism… but journalism is what the viewers think they’re getting.

It’s as if the phrase “I don’t know” vanishes from everyone’s lexicon, simply because there’s pressure to report something.

first != best

Tags: news media

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