XML apologist. Erlang enthusiast. Currently JVMs & Performance stuff at Netflix. Previously JVMs & performative stuff at Twitter. He/him.
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16% complete! Ian Brown has read 4 of 24 books.
I am reading this not to understand Elon Musk. I don't give a shit what made him a damaged human, bigot, and all around dickhead. I just want to read the parts about the Twitter takeover and the aftermath.
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about …
The nature of capital has changed: it once was mainly land but has become primarily housing plus industrial and financial assets. Yet it has lost none of its importance.
— Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Page 65)
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about …
It was the wars of the twentieth century that wiped away the past to create the illusion that capitalism had been structurally transformed.
— Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Page 64)
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about …
Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts—that is its vocation, its logical destination.
— Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Page 63)
Tough to read many of these. Children, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers...so many meet a sad end. Also wild to see the accepted practices of the world at the turn of the century. Worth a read, but buckle up and brace yourself for a rough go.
Pretty grim...stories from another age, full of death and disappointment.
But clearly no god can be more malevolent than a man-god.
— The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore (Penguin twentieth-century classics) (Page 54)
Certainly they will survive. I think that if you were to dig down deeply into our real motives you would find that the chief reason why we have not committed suicide or died out already from discouragement at the futility of existence is our faith in the machines. For many thousands of years we have fought Nature and held our own, but at last she has the upper hand. She is sweeping us away as she has swept the rest onto her huge rubbish heap where the bones of the dinosaurs molder on the fossils of a million ages. What has been the good of us? Nothing, it seems, and yet.. our minds will not accept that. There lingers, perhaps illogically, the idea of a purpose behind it all ... But physically we can go on no longer. For any other species of animal it would mean utter extinction, but we have what the other animals have never had - mind. That is our last trick. Our minds will not die yet. The machines are as truly the children of our minds as you are the child of your mother's body. They are the next step in evolution, we hand over to them.
— Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham (Page 170 - 171)
Tradition is a useful weed for binding the soil, but it grows too quickly and chokes the rest. Periodically it must be burned out.
— Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham (Page 169)
"One of the odd things about you men of action is that you so frequently forget that there are other men of action."
— Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham (Page 8)
For the Wyndham!
