James

“The world avoided” is an evocative phrase. In some ways it’s the goal of every upstream effort: To avoid a world where certain kinds of harm, injustice, disease, or hardship persist. The path to “the world avoided” is a difficult one because of the barriers we’ve seen: problem blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (That problem is not mine to fix), and tunneling (I can’t deal with that right now).”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

“I get to attend a lot of meetings, dinners, and working groups in which people are trying to bridge the divide between Washington and Silicon Valley, the defense and technology worlds, and I have come to believe that we are radically overthinking this problem. Much of the answer hinges on basic supply and demand. Again, it is a question of incentives. On any given day, billions of dollars of private capital sit on the sidelines in America, looking for promising new ventures that could yield big returns. More of that money does not flow into the defense sector because most venture capitalists have come to believe that defense is a lousy investment, and plenty of empirical evidence supports that assumption. For decades, too many defense technologies have failed to transition from promising research and development efforts to successful military programs fielded at scale. Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.” The reason there are not more success stories is not a mystery: the US government did not create the necessary incentives. It did not buy what worked best in large quantities.”
― Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

“There is no national consensus on the nature of the events that defined the country, and this very lack of consensus is, arguably, modern Russia’s greatest failing as a nation.”
― Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin