Michael

“The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.” With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government protection. That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.”
― Anonymous

“As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.”
― Anonymous

“Insight 1: Human decision making serves evolutionary goals. The traditional way of thinking about human behavior is based almost completely on a consideration of people’s surface goals—getting a decent bargain on a pair of dress shoes, for example, or picking a fine restaurant for a date next Saturday. But humans, like all animals, evolved to make choices in ways that promote deeper evolutionary purposes. Once we start looking at modern choices through this ancestral lens, many decisions that appear foolish and irrational at the surface level turn out to be smart and adaptive at a deeper evolutionary level. Insight 2: Human decision making is designed to achieve several very different evolutionary goals. Economists and psychologists have often assumed that humans seek a single broad goal: to feel good or to maximize benefits. In actuality, all humans pursue several very different evolutionary goals, such as acquiring a mate, protecting themselves from danger, and attaining status. This is an important distinction. Depending on which evolutionary goal they currently have in mind, consciously or subconsciously, people will have very different biases and make very different choices.”
― Anonymous