Quotes of the day

The real story is that wealth concentration solves otherwise difficult coordination problems. If I have $1 billion, I'll just go endow a new museum, and voila, a new museum sprouts up. It's that simple. If 10 of us have to donate $100 million each it gets harder, and if 1000 of us have to donate $1 million each to get things off the ground, then the creation of that museum will be harder still.--Joe Weisenthal

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.--Rick Cook

You could say we are breeding the perfect spammer.--Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO

[Craig Newmark's] cause is not helped by the fact that if the craigslist management style resembles any political system, it is not democracy but rather a low-key popular dictatorship. Its inner workings are obscure, it publishes no account of its income or expenses, it has no obligation to respond to criticism, and all authority rests in the hands of a single man. ... And just as people who run technical companies are reaching an apex of confidence in their ability to invent new forms of community based on sharing everything, craigslist still treats social life as dangerously complex, deserving the most jaded caution. Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster's wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.--Gary Wolf

The relationship [between Russia and China] may allow the Chinese to extract strategically important natural resources from Russia and extend their regional influence, but it affords the Russians little more than the pretense of a multipolar world in which Moscow enjoys a central role. ... China treats Russia with supreme tact, vehemently denying its own superiority -- a studious humility that only helps it maintain the upper hand. ... It is as if China went to the prom with one partner, Russia, went home with another, the United States, and then married the latter while wooing its jilted original date as a mistress. ... Russia has recovered from its moment of post-Soviet weakness but nonetheless remains a regional power that acts like a global superpower. China, on the other hand, has been transformed into a global superpower but still mostly acts like a regional power. Meanwhile, the United States is still busy trying to consolidate its triumph in the Cold War 18 years on. Recently, many people in Russia and the United States have begun to speak of a "new Cold War." This idea, however, is doubly wrong -- wrong because Russia, a regional power, cannot hope to mount a global challenge to the United States, and wrong because the old Cold War tilting never went away, with the battleground merely having been downsized, shifting from the whole globe to Kiev and Tbilisi.--Stephen Kotkin

What a strange world we live in. The government is doing everything the private sector used to do--like run car companies and fund banks--while the private sector is going all those traditionally governmental tasks--like killing people and running jails.--Lawrence Delevingne

Slavery was destroyed by capitalism.--Don Boudreaux