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Stallman's Law: While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.


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Remember, perhaps the most important commodity in politics is attention: mass media failed us this election by focusing on trivia while not doing enough to follow and correctly report huge stories. Our attention was diluted into trivia and gossip and unjustified mass hacks that were actually political sabotage, not whistleblowing, and in some cases misinformation.


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We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.


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How to MLM:

  • Agree to everything
  • Sound super excited
  • Get free food
  • When signups start, say you need to get the money togeather and invite someone
  • Invite a friend
  • Both be super excited
  • Say you want them to take your friend to dinner too to convince him
  • Get another free dinner
  • Convince your friend to invite another friend
  • Final free dinner before getting the hell out
  • You pyramid schemed the pyramid scheme

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Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.


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If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.


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You ever think about how bad we had to fuck up to create a world where robots taking all the jobs is somehow a bad thing.


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My children's school is missing certain subjects due to lack of teachers, the roads are full of potholes, the sidewalks littered with trash, buildings are gray and ugly and decrepit, people on the streets need food and shelter and care, the frigging planet is cooking and desperately in need of new kinds of housing, heating, transportation, entertainment—wherever you look there's work to be done; real, productive, meaningful, community-building work; and there are no jobs!! What's up with that? 1% of my country has as much money as the entire bottom 50% and no one's paying for work!! They just sit on the cash like dragons atop a pile of gold!! Best system my ass.


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When an employer interviews a prospective candidate, the employer typically forms a quick first impression and spends the rest of the interview seeking information that supports it.


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900 children die per day because they don't have access to clean water. I put it in a machine to make little clouds in my room so my throat isn't scratchy when I sleep at night.


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The commission on the Sistine Chapel was 3000 ducats. The tomb of Pope Julius II was 10,000 ducats.


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I think that the point of the story is not really about how often Holden complains but what and how he complains.

To me a great companion to this story is The Great Gatsby. On the surface the characters are shallow and annoyingly coy with their intentions. They seem to have no point - hell their lives are pointless, soaked in apathy and liquor.

Underneath all that is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and fear of oneself. I always felt bad for Holden because underneath his tough and bitter facade is a child alone in a world that cares nothing for him.

On the Catcher in the Rye


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Not all those who wear the name of villain, are truly evil men. Not all those who are respected as noble men, are worthy of the name. Many are those who wear a false mask of benevolence to hide their treachery and the wickedness of their true selves.


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Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, has a term for this: “retrospective wait unemployment,” or “looking for the job you used to have.”

“It’s not a skill mismatch, but an identity mismatch,” he said. “It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.