32 karma · joined October 3, 2011
Internet millionaires driving around on cell phones drain the city’s sparkle. In the old days people who made tools built factory towns on the Ohio. It was honest work but not glamorous. Today the toolmakers work in software and they have been elevated in the culture, especially here. But there is a distinction between making an app and making art. A city of toolmakers imagining themselves as artists is barbaric, heartless, empty. You feel it in the crowd eating dinner at the many expensive restaurants. People speak in sound bites and are both assertive and lost.
http://paulbudnitz.com/post/26436899116/san-francisco-is-odd...
“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation—is worth it to me.”
I recently met someone who has tourette's syndrome, which means he has increased production of dopamine. In other words — the inverse of ADD. The drugs he took induced a state of ADD that was identical to what I what I experienced sans-stimulants. It's crucial for those of us with the kind of dramatic impairment that comes with ADD to get by with as much help as possible from competent practitioners (of which there seems to be a very short supply of).
I'm not even sure what you're trying to argue here—nobody wants the rights to your intelligence. But if you take a step back, you can see that every one of us has benefitted greatly from others' intelligent contributions to humanity and we can choose to either keep that wheel spinning or put ourselves at the mercy of others' history-making. If you want to use your tech idols as a yardstick for morality and virtue, you ought to look a little closer.
"I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.” -STEVE JOBS
Some of my favorite quotes, however, are from the mouth of Napoleon:
"All my life I have sacrificed everything—comfort, self-interest, happiness—to my destiny."
"Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest."