James Fallows Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.
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Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.
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Make the important interesting.
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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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Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.
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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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A little bullet pays off so much in wound ballistics. That is what people who choose these weapons know.
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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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Successful societies-those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world-succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good.
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Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.
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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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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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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 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.