To offend a strong man, tell him a lie, To offend a weak man, tell him the truth — Marcus Aurelius

Milton Friedman on the U.S. public school system: “What we have is a monopoly, and like every monopoly, it’s producing a low-quality product at a very high cost.” “The way to improve that is to have competition—to make it possible for parents to have a choice of the schools their children attend.”

Science doesn’t require scientists to be perfect. It requires their claims to be testable. That’s the clever bit.

“Allegedly”

Carl Sagan on books ✍️ "What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."

“The hardest thing in the world is to get rid of any government program, however badly it works.” — Milton Friedman

My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery. Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster. He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals. I wish Captain Machchhar a speedy and full recovery. He is a true hero.

If you have not heard this news story, it is pretty big in the chemistry world. Being able to break down polyethylene cheaply is a big deal. It makes waste plastic more valuable, which makes it less likely people will just throw it into rivers where it flushes into the oceans.

Milton Friedman: “The problem with government is the absence of any mechanism for recognizing errors. What the private system abounds in is survival of the fittest.” “What the governmental system abounds in is expansion of the mistakes. There is no mechanism for eliminating governmental agencies which are no longer needed or have behaved perversely.”

The man who invented the operation that saves babies born with blue-baby syndrome had no medical degree, no college degree, and was listed on the payroll as a JANITOR. He guided the first operation from a stool behind the surgeon's shoulder, telling him where to cut. Vivien Thomas. He had been saving to study medicine when the 1929 crash wiped out his savings and the bank holding them. He took a job as a lab assistant at Vanderbilt for a janitor's wage, because that was the classification available. Within a couple of years he was running experimental surgery — developing techniques, performing operations on his own, training surgeons. He moved to Johns Hopkins with Alfred Blalock in 1941, where he was still paid as a janitor and had to enter through a back door. He was the only Black man in that building not carrying a mop. He worked out the surgical fix for tetralogy of Fallot — the condition killing infants who turned blue and died — and built the instruments for it. The first operation on a child was in 1944. Blalock, who had never done the procedure, asked Thomas to stand behind him and talk him through it. The surgeons on the paper became world famous. Thomas was not credited. Hopkins hung his portrait in 1971 and gave him an honorary doctorate in 1976. Generations of surgeons he personally trained insisted on it. He was paid as a cleaner while inventing heart surgery.

“In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.” — Milton Friedman

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” - Thomas Sowell

Income tax is the most inefficient of tax systems. It requires the government to be extremely intrusive and to install financial surveillance. It also provides high incentive for evasion. A flat sales tax is a better option.

A proportional tax system is consistent with equality before the law: everyone is subject to the same tax rate, regardless of income, occupation, or social status. By contrast, “fair share” can always be redefined. That very arbitrariness makes the phrase politically useful: politicians can campaign on it, and activists can use it to mobilize resentment against whichever group is not “paying enough.”

« La plupart des gens ne font pas la différence entre un introverti et quelqu'un qui évite leurs bêtises. » Dostoïevski

“Some are born to enjoy illusions, others are cursed to see the truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

友人の子ども(15)から質問 子「サハラ砂漠って何も無いんだから、ソーラーパネルにすればよくない?」 私「それ検討した人いるよ」 子「マジで？どうなったの？」 私「世界のエネルギー需要の18倍を発電できる計算になった。でも、同時に恐ろしいことも分かったんだ」 子「なに？」 私「それはね…