James Fallows Quotes
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I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar.
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When a company is charging money for a product - as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync - you understand its incentive for sticking with that product.
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I don't think anybody who is already with Donald Trump is going to be peeled off by his not knowing about NATO or why Japan does not have nuclear weapons, or things of that sort.
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Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.
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Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.
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Every previous era looks innocent.
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Make the important interesting.
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No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.
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The technology of nonstop news and the Internet means that allegations that would have been carefully checked out a generation ago no longer are. We now have a 24-hour-a-day news cycle. News gets used up very quickly and there's a constant hunger for new tidbits.
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No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.
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I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.
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As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.
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In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.
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For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
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Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions.
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Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.
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Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.
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Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.
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The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.
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A little bullet pays off so much in wound ballistics. That is what people who choose these weapons know.
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A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.
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There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
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For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.
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I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the 'Boston Phoenix.' I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.