The more features a product acquires, the worse it becomes at what it was originally designed to do.
Mar 242021
Working
Business is more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind more continuously, and more deeply.
—Bagehot
Mar 112021
Law of Insufficient Time: It’s always later than you think, even after accounting for the Law of Insufficient Time.
Feb 222021
If you want something done right, get someone to do it who knows how.
Feb 042021
Munitions manufacturers exist because we want to war; cigarette manufacturers because we want to smoke; and manufacturers of lies and imbecilities because we want to believe them.
Jan 272021
Great problems are solved backwards: practice, then theory, and philosophical foundations, if ever, last of all.
Jan 252021
Law of Scientific Consensus: A consensus will form on the hypothesis most likely to confer funding and employment. This hypothesis will always be termed “scientific” and may well be true.
Jan 192021
A political slogan on a corporation’s website is an act of mischief; in a shopkeeper’s window it is a plea to be spared.
Dec 302020
The distinguished Soviet geneticist Vavilov was unpersoned for refusing to reject heredity in favor of the neo-Lamarckism championed by Lysenko and Stalin, and I feel fortunate to live in a country where nothing like that could ever happen.
Dec 142020
Being told so much more often to Look Professional and Act Professional than Be Professional, one begins to suspect that it is in looking and acting that professionalism largely consists.
Dec 022020
A polity achieves decadence when the companies that help you make money make less money than the companies that help you spend it.