When a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
Racial purity is a laughable concept to anybody who knows anything about genetics, almost as laughable, in fact, as that creepy obsession with ancestry. Go back a few hundred years and everybody is descended from everybody else. Family trees are a joke and I reckon I should be King, but so, probably, should you. Anyway, claiming racial purity for the English is more than just laughable, it's insane. We are such hopeless mongrels, as Daniel Defoe pointed out with riotous good humour...
I refuse to become dependent on apps grown in their environment. To me it's like contributing to the enslavement of my brother and sister programmers. I don't care how sexy the environment is as a user or a developer, the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won't use iPhone apps for ecological reasons.
I use my iPhone as a: 1. Phone. 2: Camera that can communicate (very valuable feature to me). 3. A Bluetooth tethering device for places my Sprint MiFi doesn't work (and that's a lot of places).
For that I pay about $100 per month. I think I'm being ripped off. (Sure of it.)
I follow medical advice in only one respect, which is to make sure that I swallow the two shots of alcoholic medicine that doctors now agree is essential for the heart and the arteries. (And remember - no cheating. The New England Journal Of Medicine is very clear on this. At least two drinks, and every day. No skipping. No skimping, please.)
For the rest, a high-anxiety lifestyle and a minimum of strenuous exercise means that I can still see my feet (on a clear day, that is, and if for any reason I should wish to see them).
I also took special note of the recent finding that decaffeinated coffee beans are higher in cholesterol and that nicotine aids concentration and helps to ward off Alzheimer's disease.
My doctor keeps asking me how I do it. And that's the relationship I want to have with my doctor - giving him advice instead of taking it from him.
China's leadership isn't big on religion. And apparently they don't see any upside in war. They handle their money wisely. They put a lot of energy into building infrastructure. And they care more about stability than human rights. In other words, they value efficiency over feelings. It's exactly the way you'd expect a bunch of engineers to run a country. Obviously this approach has served China well.
The bad news for China is that their up-and-coming leaders have backgrounds in law, economics, and history. In time, the lawyers will start passing lots of laws that individually make sense while collectively strangling the business sector in red tape. The economists will all disagree with each other, and the historians will be planning for the past. So China is pretty much doomed. But they had a good run.
It's not the nature of capitalism to need to teach people a lesson, it's the nature of being a human, we just blame it on capitalism. In fact, smart marketers understand that the word 'right' in "The customer is always right" doesn't mean that they'd win in court or a debate. It means, "If you want the customer to remain a customer, you need to permit him to believe he's right."
If someone thinks they're unhappy, then you know what? They are.
Trying say this to yourself: I have no problem acknowledging that you're unhappy, upset or even angry. Next time, I'd prefer to organize our interaction so you don't end up feeling that way, and I probably could have done it this time, too. You have my attention and my empathy and I value you. Thanks for being here.
One thing you have to be careful about, though, is that duct tape programmers are the software world equivalent of pretty boys... those frighteningly good-looking young men who can roll out of bed, without shaving, without combing their hair, and without brushing their teeth, and get on the subway in yesterday’s dirty clothes and look beautiful, because that’s who they are. You, my friend, cannot go out in public without combing your hair. It will frighten the children. Because you’re just not that pretty. Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick. They have to be good enough programmers to ship code, and we’ll forgive them if they never write a unit test, or if they xor the “next” and “prev” pointers of their linked list into a single DWORD to save 32 bits, because they’re pretty enough, and smart enough, to pull it off.
