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“Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history…” (via Glen) 
TED Prize : Wishes Big Enough to Change the World (via Kelsey) ” … Together, Slim, Gates, Buffett, and Ambani control more wealth than the world’s poorest 57 countries. The danger is that while we have a global economy that knows how to concentrate money and power in an ever smaller set of hands, we have no robust mechanism to alert us to the injustice, dangers, and instability that come along with this package. Someday, to our peril, the poor will find their own way to remind us.” 
” … the central point: people think the distribution of wealth is more equal than it actually is; and they think it should be much more equal than their already unrealistically-equal notion of its current state. Eg: the top 20% of the US wealth distribution actually controls nearly 85% of total wealth; people think the top 20% controls under 60%; and they think it should control just over 30%” (via More on the Wealthy Poor and a “Fair” Society) “When Mr. Ainslie reviews the overall plan, he is thinking about the size of every position. Mr. Robertson [for whom Mr. Ainslie worked in the early 1990s] taught him to test his conviction by asking himself if the stock is a buy or a sell. A hold isn’t an option. ‘This is how I’ve come to think of it over the years: Either this security deserves incremental capital at the current price point or it doesn’t — in which case, let’s sell it and put the money to work in a security that deserves that incremental capital,’ Mr. Ainslie said. Maverick doesn’t use pre-assigned price targets. The world changes, Mr. Ainslie said, and his sector heads and their teams are continually re-evaluating their positions.” “Urban Prep would be a charter high school. It would bring together some 150 boys from some of the poorest, gang-ravaged neighborhoods and try to set them on a new track. They’d have strict rules: A longer school day - by two hours. Two classes of English daily. A uniform with jackets and ties. And Urban Prep had a goal - one that seemed audacious, given that just 4 percent of the Class of 2010 was reading at or above grade level when they arrived at the school in 2006… ‘I’m very attached to Marlon,’ she says. ‘I had him when I was 15. … They told me my boy was going to be a statistic. They told me he was going to be another gangbanger. Well, we’re here to prove them wrong.’” “It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a complete set of anything because repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern,” said Mr. Phillips, who is slight and sinewy with a long gray ponytail and bushy mustache. He grips the armrests of his chair when he talks as if his latent energy might otherwise catapult him out of his seat. “From CNN’s American Morning (2/1/10), an interview by anchor Kiran Chetry with White House OMB director Peter Orszag: CHETRY: You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class. ORSZAG: Well, I guess it’s not the parts of the country where I’ve been. Households that make $250,000 or more a year make up 1.5 percent of the U.S. public.” |
