Rick > Rick's Quotes

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care”
― Emily Dickinson

“The seemingly random events of Brexit, Trump, and a rise in populism and hate in our world are not haphazard or isolated at all. They are all connected to a loss in hope for a better future for large portions of the population. Underlying this loss of hope is a new economic reality where it’s not just the poor who are missing out on economic gains. Much of the middle class is also feeling squeezed. Instead of technology allowing for a fifteen-hour work week, as Keynes predicted when he penned his 1930s essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” vast numbers of people are working longer, in jobs they rightly fear will soon be gone. Trapped—wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third.1 Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Deep thinking and learning is also taxing on our energy stores, and so we require simplification and reinforcement. Our minds, through repetition or emotion, learn things and then, having committed them to memory, rely on this information and often never question it again; we put our energy into other things we deem more important. Like building a structure with a strong base, we make our mental models the foundation for adding newer information. We notice things that match our view and we dismiss things that do not. As we build our narrow knowledge on top of that foundation, we might not even realize when the foundation itself is weak. And so, as we go on with our lives, filtering a massive amount of information, we can easily become blind to important information, caught in our own bubbles, disregarding some information or alternative views, even when it might be helpful to us. Our decisions are shaped by what we regard as the facts, and if new information emerges that belies what we believe, it often hardens us to our original view.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Even if we accept that we are prone to errors in judgment, how do we know when to dig deeper? When might our own views not be built on stable foundations? Fortunately, there are a number of ways. Avid readers and learners, especially those who study across various fields, will tell you that they read diverse topics so they can connect patterns across disciplines or industries. From this practice, they train their brain to recognize opportunity, seeing what worked in one place and applying it elsewhere. By doing so, these people force themselves to break out of the walls that could trap them and to remain open to possibility.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2018, travel contributed $8.8 trillion and 319 million jobs to the global economy. Entire local economies have become reliant on tourist dollars. What will they do if travelling slows?”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“In 2015, Bill Gross gave a great TED Talk in Vancouver (viewed more than two million times) where he discussed his research on the differences between companies that succeeded or failed. The findings surprised even Bill when he determined that timing stood out above all in determining success rates of startups. In fact, 42 percent of the success could be attributed to timing. Rounding out the top five things in determining success were the team/execution at 32 percent, the idea at 28 percent, the business model at 24 percent, and funding at 14 percent.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Strong network effects are at the core of every platform business today. In fact, in a recent three-year study by NFX, network effects accounted for 70 percent of the value in technology companies over the last twenty-three years.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Aggregating all supply and allowing that supply to compete for audiences is how all platforms gain their power.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“The world order, largely intact since the end of the World War II, seems to be breaking down. Capitalism, and its relentless march towards progress, allowed many to win. Although no system is perfect, the rules by which capitalism operated were well regarded and understood. You could expect that if you made a big bet and were wrong, you would be wiped out—but if you were right, your hard work, ingenuity, or risk taking would be rewarded. In game theory, we could call this a dominant cooperative strategy, and it dominated for the better part of the twentieth century. The rise of fiat currencies that could be manipulated domestically and the bailout in 2008 changed that strategy to one where the players whose bad bets caused the crisis, instead of being wiped out, were rewarded handsomely. Capitalism’s long-dominant cooperative strategy was replaced by a non-dominant strategy, crony capitalism, where the cheaters won.”
― Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future

“Ormerod examined the performance of democratic governments on those issues that perennially engaged their ambitions: what I have called their claims to competence. Take unemployment as an obvious example. Every contemporary government has claimed the ability to reduce unemployment. The architects of the stimulus bill passed in 2009 claimed that it would save or create 3.5 million jobs and significantly lower the unemployment rate. It would do so by spending a lot of money. Of necessity, that has been the chosen economic tool of government. Since World War II, Ormerod notes, governments have absorbed a much larger chunk of the national output in pursuit of worthy goals such as full employment. In Britain, where excellent statistics have been kept from the Victorian era onward, the size of the public sector as a proportion of the economy has doubled since 1946, compared to the period 1870–1938. Yet the difference in the average unemployment rate before and after the expansion of government was statistically negligible. A”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There was never a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Not to commit espionage. Not to violate any law. Zip, zero, nada.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency