“It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it…The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”
–Montaigne
Representation without taxation is not our fatal problem. People from every income group should accept the responsibility to vote wisely, and insist on absolute fidelity to the Constitution – that mighty covenant between free men and the lawful republic they defied the guns of empire to raise. Our legislators and President are meant to be the guardians of our freedom, not the engineers of our lives… or merchants who trade entitlements for power. The thick web of puppet strings which spread from our titanic State reach deep into the 53% who still pay taxes. Ignorance and ideology led us to this moment, not just the selfish votes of our permanent dependency class. The government needs to shrink, not the electorate.
I’m a professional musician — composer, arranger, producer, worship leader, jazz performer. The times when my work becomes tedious and sloggy, which happen often, are the times I can look back on with most joy, because there’s nothing mere about a job, and there’s nothing mere about digging into it.
context here. Couldn’t have said it better. Couldn’t have said it as well. 
“The path of big government and the welfare state is the path to broken promises and inter-generational warfare. The workers in California and vendors in Illinois are paying the price for the unsustainable public sector union contracts which preceded them, sometimes by decades. Yet those of us who call for fiscal sanity and reform are derided by people like Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democrats as having no compassion. Just the opposite is true. It’s called tough love. Those who feed the big government addiction are the cruel ones.” via
“[I]n…a system in which each is allowed to use his knowledge for his own purposes the concept of `social justice’ is necessarily empty and meaningless, because in it nobody’s will can determine the relative incomes of the different people, or prevent that they be partly dependent on accident. `Social justice’ can be given a meaning only in a directed or `command’ economy (such as an army) in which the individuals are ordered what to do; and any particular conception of `social justice’ could be realized only in such a centrally directed system. It presupposes that people are guided by specific directions and not by rules of just individual conduct. Indeed, no system of rules of just individual conduct, and therefore no free action of the individuals, could produce results satisfying any principle of distributive justice…In a free society in which the position of the different individuals and groups is not the result of anybody’s design–or could, within such a society, be altered in accordance with a generally applicable principle–the differences in reward simply cannot meaningfully be described as just or unjust.”
F.A. Hayek,
“You’ll never crush your own mediocrity working only four hours a week.”
Robert Bruce
It’s always fun to go on vacation as a self-employed person, because a) you still have to work, and b) no one thinks you do any work to begin with. So then when you go on vacation, they say, oh, must be nice that you don’t have a job and can do that. Meanwhile on vacation I work six hours a day instead of ten. But it’s all good.
“There are things we think we want to do, and there are things that we are meant to do.”
Bill Berloni
“Enthusiasm is energetic, positive, generous, and social. It’s outward-turning and engaged. It’s kind of goofy.
Enthusiasm is a form of social courage; it’s safer to criticize and scoff than to praise and embrace.
There’s a dark tendency in human nature to mock or attack other people’s enthusiasms. It’s easy to make fun of ping-pong or Barry Manilow or Star Trek or wine-tasting — but why do it?”
Gretchen Rubin
She’s right.
People are more comfortable in the role of sarcastic, biting critic than in the role of open-minded enthusiast. I find the company of the critic tiresome. There is a difference between honest criticism in order to improve something (which is needed and even desired if it comes from a trusted source), and the kind of knee-jerk, cynical negativity that seeks to mock what it doesn’t enjoy. There’s too much of this in the world. Unfortunately, society takes a low view of the enthusiastic person much of the time. I say screw society. There’s nothing wrong or naive or simple about an honest, childlike “WOW!”. I try and consciously cultivate this view of the world, and privately get a kick out of saying it in the presence of people who think it means I’m not sophisticated.
The enthusiastic person draws other enthusiastic people to him or herself. And it’s a much happier place to live.
Related: Cory Doctorow’s excellent post “Too Much Time on His Hands”
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you.”
Pablo Picasso
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
- Mark Twain
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.
When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan’s “form follows function,” what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.
Designing a particularly difficult prop right now (no right angles, very organic) and it’s giving me fits. The design of it isn’t particularly difficult, but the execution is driving me nuts. How to make something with no right angles out of basic, cheap materials that are only right angles? I’m having fun, but the moment of execution (the prop or my own) is drawing nearer. I’ll be able to post more in March when all secrets are out.
“…when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.
Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.”
Paul Graham, paulgraham.com
“…though there is a lot of language to describe music, there aren’t words for some of it. It’s a case of you know it when you hear it. Or more to the point, you know it when you don’t hear it…That final spark that takes a piece of music from being competent to being inspired, gives it that last boost so that, even from the first bars, you know this is it.”
John Varley, Rolling Thunder, p 96
I may have posted this a while back, but it’s worth a re-post. The ultimate Geek Library.
“The public has greatly over-estimated the possibilities of the aeroplane, imagining that in another generation they will be able to fly over to London in a day.This is manifestly impossible.”
William Pickering, Harvard University astronomy professor, 1908.
“There is no limit to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Heh. B.T.S.
“I’ve been caught, so to speak–like someone who was given something wonderful when he was a child, and he’s always looking for it again. I’m always looking, like a child, for the wonders I know I’m going to find–maybe not every time, but every once in a while.”
Richard Feynman, on his early education.
“The Yankees, the first mechanics in the world, are engineers — just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians — by right of birth.”
Jules Verne
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