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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Hunger Games, is based on the premise that future US society will possess force fields and antigravity devices—but have no idea how to grow tomatoes.
But the trend is toward lower levels of pesticides. Many consumers don’t like foodstuffs with the spooky-sounding stamp GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM, yet such plants are less likely than other kinds to be dusted with chemicals.
98 percent of the world’s water is salty: the 2 percent that is fresh is not held in lakes and rivers but mainly in glaciers and snowpack, which global warming is melting.
was just a century ago that a burger—red meat on white bread—was “available exclusively to the rich and powerful.” Today a billion people eat steer-based food on a steady basis, another two billion eat such fare occasionally, and for good or ill, most of the rest of the world aspires to join the cheeseburger party.
nice..
Animals, plants, and pathogens developed jointly: the living ecosystem has been resisting disease for eons. Had any disease ever “won,” the result would have been lights-out for the disease, which would have lost its hosts.
Kids are getting smart about not getting blasted, grown-ups are getting dumb. (Binge drinking at college fraternities and sororities is bad, but same-age Americans not enrolled in school are more likely to abuse alcohol than college students.)
Nobody-in-control economics improves living standards for almost everyone while encouraging social progress, since even Fortune 500 types observe that shaking up the system is good. Based on what’s known today at least, the average person is best served by an uncommanded system. But the thought that the big chair is empty is unsettling.
Stability is what people want, and the modern economy does not produce stability.
Trump and Sanders told audiences that millions of American jobs had been “lost” to China. These jobs cannot be found in China, or anywhere, because they no longer exist—
Today a man with a college diploma earns on average $20,000 more than a man whose education stopped in high school.
With the United States today the existing dominant power, China, the rising power, might seem to be stepping into a Thucydides Trap. But Sparta and Athens had little economic interconnection, while there have never been two large economies as entwined as China’s and America’s.
Studies show smartphones that work through a car’s sound system are just as dangerous as the handheld type—the content of the call, not holding a brick to your ear, is what distracts the driver.
there is a lot of urban living ahead: the move from the countryside to cities will continue to accelerate, making most men and women better educated, more tolerant, and accustomed to being around people who are different from them—the last effect being perhaps the great virtue of the city.
Why I love "The City"
We’d like to think democracy wins because of ethical superiority: in an ideal world, the ethical superiority of representative government might be the alpha and omega of this issue. In the real post-1940 world, what matters foremost is that democracy is better than dictatorship at money and at war.
Controlling what already exists is the backward-focused goal of tyranny: creating what will exist
Today’s world wants dollars, euros, and yen and maybe a little digital currency. No one in the entire expanse of the Milky Way wants rubles. Iran is spoken of as if a potent nation, but its economy is a Dumpster fire:
With each passing year, colleges and universities matter more while mineral deposits and animal husbandry matter less.
indeed...
During his presidential candidacy, Bernie Sanders said American government “serves only the one percent.” Sanders made this claim a short time after Congress enacted ObamaCare, an income-transfer program that was funded by capital-gains taxes on top earners
he discovered that people wanted to blame whatever they didn’t like, or whatever was wrong in their lives, on the federal government. They did not want to blame their families, friends, or communities, and despite the American ethos of self-reliance, they emphatically did not want to blame themselves.
Many in the American polity further believe Washington is squandering their money while their statehouses and city halls are not.
Since Franklin Roosevelt, every newly elected president other than Dwight Eisenhower has pronounced that some kind of emergency validates extra power for the White House.
“Free” and “somebody else pays” commonly are confused in public debate.
High state minimum wages do not seem to spike unemployment, as sometimes predicted. California’s unemployment with a high minimum wage is fourth-tenths of a percent above unemployment in Texas, which has a low minimum wage.
How many who voted for Trump in 2016, expressing anger about economic currents, were willing to pack their belongings and move to a place where the job market is better, as opposed to demanding subsidies and trade protections?
New York City is run by those liberals,” bear in mind that New York City also is an economic powerhouse the whole world envies.
researchers, philosophers, and theologians have been unable to agree on what human consciousness is, how can there be an artificial version of something whose natural version defies comprehension?
