jaspermogg’s most recent Quotables

...Missouri." That US state's official motto is "Show me"..."I come from a country that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me."

Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Something similar has been happening for a long time in the construction industry. When you had a house built a couple hundred years ago, the local builders built everything in it. But increasingly what builders do is assemble components designed and manufactured by someone else. This has, like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but it is certainly more efficient.

...people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of accumulating money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I want...as soon as possible. So governments that forbid you to accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing that you work slowly. ...let you earn $3 million over fifty years, but they're not willing to let you work so hard that you can do it in two.

If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know...the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.