"I'm probably only going to post quotes here"

“The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).”

“Where “Game of Thrones” paired diabolical plots for power with astonishing action, “3 Body Problem” offers little personal intrigue to balance its increasingly unimpressive attempts at spectacle. It may not be fair to compare the two — they’re different genres with different origins and different goals — but whether it’s the shared creators and cast, or similar worldviews and barriers to entry, there’s a common thread linking the two series — and not one Netflix is hoping fans notice. Both are easy enough to track, but “3 Body’s” problem is it’s far too difficult to enjoy.”

“Science fiction was a rarity in China when Liu was growing up because most western books were banned. Living in a coal mining town in Shanxi province as a young man, he found a book hidden in a box that once belonged to his father. It was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, and Liu read it in secret, and in doing so forged a lifelong love of science fiction.”

“We are not owed more comedy than a comedian creates, just as we are not owed more music from a musician or more movies from a director. We are not owed more creativity than the human that wants to provide it, and what makes art special is the amount of it that a human being can produce is, like a human life, limited. We are not vending machines, and creativity is not an unlimited source. It becomes harder in different ways as we age and we grow around those challenges to keep doing it. And sometimes people run out of energy, or have to adapt.”

“AI can definitely accomplish things utterly beyond human capabilities. We don’t even need AI to do that: a pocket calculator can carry out arithmetic calculations in a flash that would take a human brain many minutes to pull off. But no computer can replicate human brain function without undergoing the same experiences that a human experiences. No computer will be able to successfully emulate empathy, because no computer will ever have its heart broken. No computer will ever be teased by schoolmates, or become embarrassed by acne, or be terribly confused by the hormones surging through it during puberty. No computer will ever suffer sexual abuse, or resent its low income, or be afraid of crime, or experience assholes on the Internet. Without those experiences, a computer cannot empathize with humans. This is why computers will never be good teachers. People worry that computers will eliminate all jobs; they’re wrong. Computers will free up enough workers to permit the proper teacher:student ratio — one to one.”

“What Trump was attempting to do on January 6 was to use squadrismo to assert his political will. Trump has never wanted to dissociate himself with the various extreme right formations—the organized or semi-organized mob— that have flocked to him, because he sees them as politically important. Simply put, on January 6 wanted to intimidate the legislature and the vice president into keeping him in office. While Trump does not directly control these groups to the extent either Hitler and Mussolini did, and therefore they are more like the splintered groups that appeared on Feb 6 1934, it’s important to note that even those leaders had trouble controlling their paramilitary movements, which had their own ambitious chiefs, and they sometimes sought to contain or minimize them in order to seek normalizing arrangements with conservative elites. And sometimes squadrist actions threatened these leaders relationships with their conservative allies. After the murder of Matteotti it looked as if the establishment might break with Mussolini, just as in the wake of January 6 it looked like Trump might have lost even the begrudging acceptance of Republican leadership. Though he lost the day, Trump weathered that crisis politically and his relationship with the conservative elite remains mostly intact.”

“This is not the first time that the United States has come into conflict with the Houthis. For years, the United States supported Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis. Both the Obama and Trump administrations provided a Saudi-led military coalition with advanced weaponry and military advice, even as it repeatedly committed war crimes by striking civilian targets.”

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

“She was like moonlight in my starless sky.”

“We live in a broken society with a broken corporate power structure. One where managers and management are protected by the corporate version of qualified immunity, and where failings are the result of poor performance by others and successes are a result of the grand strategic vision of a disconnected executive despot. The result is a weaker economy, a grimmer society, and a workforce that is constantly reminded that the powerful are the ones who don’t want to work.”