Brian

“Amazon Go remained a money loser. But Bezos was still looking at it as a bet on computer vision and artificial intelligence, the kind of long-term, high-stakes experiment that was necessary to produce meaningful outcomes for large companies. As he wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter: We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“The fact is, people who are metabolically healthy do not get hungry unless they’ve been extremely active, skipped a couple of meals, or have been undereating for a few days in a row. When they do get hungry, the next meal they eat will taste really, really good. As Miguel de Cervantes observed long ago, “Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Catherine Shanahan, The Fatburn Fix: Boost Energy, End Hunger, and Lose Weight by Using Body Fat for Fuel

“It has to do with intelligence. Yes. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris