“you’d rather have a guaranteed $10 million rather than coin flip for $110M”

“After all these years, Disney still embodies our most dearly held ideals: Bravery, honor, standing up for the little guy. But as megacorporations gain hold of every dimension of our lives, isn’t Disney — with its multitiered, omnipresent marketing and its age-specific, identity-focused gateway drugs to lifelong brand loyalty — the ideal brand to resist? Instead, we tell ourselves that this must be what happiness feels like: total surrender.”

Interactive explanation of how neurons learn and unlearn things.

“The leadership part isn’t just about having any of set of dubious personal morals — but defining a moral compass that everyone can follow; by which people can attain and exceed to their truest potential. That is the test of moral leadership. And it is precisely that test that most of our so-called leaders fail.”

“A standard economists’ argument goes roughly like this: Technology is introduced only when it is profitable, and lowers the costs of production. Thus the prices of the goods and services produced must go down, leaving consumers with more money to spend on other products, and this creates demand for any workers who are displaced. Thus there will always be new industries growing up to employ any workers displaced by technological change in existing industries. But that argument applies just as well to the oats, apples, and grooming needed for horses to subsist as for the wages of humans, no? One could conclude that there will always be things for horses to do that will have them create enough value to earn their keep.”

“…there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “The Road Not Taken,” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.”