Since well before the pandemic, we’ve lived in a world of low-friction digital communication, where passing an obligation to someone else is extremely easy.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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In the E.R., interactions between patient and doctor rarely unfold neatly and logically. A patient starts with a description of chest pain, circles back to a fever, remembers a medication he stopped taking, mentions a family history of heart disease only after his wife prompts him, then adds one more symptom as the encounter is wrapping up. But the A.I. scribe converts that wandering, stuttering exchange into a tidy clinical synthesis — a miracle, it seems! The messy human sprawl of the visit returned to me clean and perfectly punctuated in less than a minute.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own.
~ Anthony Lane via The New Yorker
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In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Empires of the past were built upon the idea that conquest was the divine right of great powers. There was no legal distinction between the acquisition, occupation and takeover of foreign territory. The Portuguese did as they wished in Angola, and the British did as they wished in India.
~ Linda Kinstler via The New York Times
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Cameron has never been in love – at least, nobody’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him, he’s gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, ’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work.
~ Ferris Bueller
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The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.
~ Jim Collins, Good to Great
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Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
~ Joseph Heller
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The show, a sort of elegy for Gen X, opens with a flash-forward to July 16, 1999, the final hours of Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy, Jr. On the tarmac, the lovers crouch, pressing their foreheads together, as if knowledgeable about their impending end.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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Persistent current account deficits also drive the increasing dominance of financial activities in the American economy, a process known as “financialization.” Because the current account deficit means the United States purchases more goods and services from abroad than it sells, foreigners accumulate dollars that must ultimately be invested in dollar-denominated financial assets.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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