You are going to have to get out there and sell yourself. Make a fool of yourself – whatever it takes. Make sure you appear on the front page and not the back pages.
— Richard Branson Founder of Virgin Group & British Billionaire EntrepreneurThis ease of gaining virtue status on social media, coupled with our innate desire for status, explains the platform's toxicity. We're drawn to the simplest form of status acquisition, and social media facilitates this with minimal effort, creating a cycle of virtue signalling that feeds our need for recognition and approval.
Only a handful of diplomats and governments are prepared to put the global good before the national interest. Seldom is it the case for any diplomat that they put the global good high up on the agenda; in my career I've seen it very rarely. Only 30 of the 193 or so ambassadors at the UN in NY will be devoted to a multilateral context. Most are pursuing bilateral interests in a multilateral context.
Africa is an enormous continent, larger than the US, China and Europe combined. It represents 20% of the global land mass, and only 10% of the world's population. It offers an un-crowded space of opportunities including minerals, natural resources, water and agriculture.
since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear….
We have to start breaking the toxic hyper-masculine alpha male attitude that has become the norm across businesses that you should always be hustling, never sleep, that rest is for wimps.
Disability is an impairment, but an impairment is not necessarily a disability. The interaction of an impairment with the social barriers that surround you may or may not turn that impairment into a disability. For example; I am a wheelchair user, and If I see a building in front of me with three steps, I cannot get into it. If I cannot get into it, it's not because I'm on a wheelchair; it's because the building has 3 steps. If the same building had a ramp, my wheelchair would not be an impairment and I could easily get into the building.
There are all kinds of things where we can use technology to reflect our own humanity to better us.
The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.
We all share the same 'planet in space'. When you take the time to think about it, that 'we're all in space' part is pretty compelling. I would argue though that small does not mean insignificant. It is a bit of a contradiction – seeing the beauty of Earth from space and the reality of how small our planet is in the grand scheme of the universe, but at the same time recognizing the significance in how perfectly placed in the universe our planet is to take care of us.
We can take a hell of a lot more stress than we believe we can. We should learn how to fight not flight. And fight doesn't have to be a physical thing – it can be that you feel something's going to be uncomfortable 'okay well let's avoid it'. No, go through with it but go through with it in a progressive manner.
This historical and cultural trajectory, while understandable, seemingly dismisses the idea that computers can serve as invaluable complements to human cognition. We ought to look beyond mere abstract potentialities of human capabilities and consider the tangible ways AI can assist when humans interact with their environment.
Looking back, it was one of the best things that could've happened to me. It was a rude awakening and it felt like my world was crashing in on me. It was a rough few days after the fight but instead of choosing to feel sorry for myself, I used the defeat as fuel for more determination.