The past and the future

“The Cascadia subduction [earthquake] zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.”
— The Really Big One—An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, The question is when. Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, July 20, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one–

Forever

“Once the very last remnants of the very last stars have finally decayed away to nothing, and everything reaches the same temperature, the story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered.

Nothing happens and it keeps not happening. Forever.”
— Physicist Brian Cox, on the heat death of the universe. From The Wonders of the Universe: The Cosmos Made Conscious

Humility was expensive

“Ford thought of itself as the sort of foundation whose staff did not dictate what its grantees should do but sought out grantees with ideas and methods of their own: that was the social-justice way. But, ironically, this meant that it required far more staff than it would if it came up with its own ideas and hired people to execute them. Coming up with ideas to be executed was the sort of thing that could be done in a meeting at headquarters; but finding small, local N.G.O.s and community leaders and artists and researchers to fund in dozens of countries around the world required offices in those countries, with program staff and administrative staff and maintenance staff and gardeners and drivers, plus money for travel and hosting meetings and all the rest of it. […] Humility was expensive.”
— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

The supplicants were far away

“The first thing he noticed when he arrived at Rockefeller was a strange sense of calm. There was a slow deliberateness to the way things moved that he wasn’t used to—there was no sense of urgency. There was no sense of urgency, he gradually realized, because the people at Rockefeller had no one to answer to. On Wall Street, he always had clients breathing down his neck, and at Abyssinian there were always people lining up in the office who needed his help that very minute. But at Rockefeller the people who needed help were far away—distant supplicants who communicated through applications and waited months for an answer. The supplicants had no right to demand anything—they took what they could get and were grateful for it.”
— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

Decades

“If donors and nonprofits felt that they had to measure their results, might that not lead them to focus on limited sorts of things that could be measured precisely: administering vaccines, for instance, rather than attempting to improve over-all health; or counting missed days of school rather than evaluating student achievement? And what would happen to things that could not properly be measured at all, such as oppression, or justice? What about initiatives whose success could take decades to become evident, such as social movements or the erosion of cultural norms?”
— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016 [An example of the clothes line paradox]

"And how soon would success have to happen?"

“Was it better to be bold and risk failure, or to give money to a project that had a good chance of success? And how soon would success have to happen in order to count—five years? Ten? Was it better to be patient or impatient? On the one hand, social justice wasn’t the sort of thing that happened overnight; on the other hand, there had to be some point at which a program could be declared a failure and cut off, or there would be no accountability at all.”
— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

"A near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles"

“The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money.”
— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

Facebook

“The East India company was the spearhead of the British empire. They controlled the two most important commodities you needed for economic growth. One was labor and the other was actual commodities. In the post internet age attention and connectivity are the two limiting factors to economic growth. By controlling those points what you’re looking at is Facebook is trying to control what will happen in the future.”
— Om Malik re: Facebook’s Internet.org effort, on This Week in Tech #546 (starts at 13:45)

Om continues:

I think people look at it and just say “no, this is just about the Internet.” But if the Facebook logarithm can decide who wins the elections in Egypt or India or wherever that is not a good situation to have. They have never addressed those issues directly. They don’t address the insidious nature of internet.org and its impact on local governments and local populations. So, I understand that they are trying to do good by giving access to people, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. This is all about advertising, making money, and decisions which will be made based on how Facebook makes more money in the future. […] I Draw the parallel between what was the East India company and I think Facebook is trying to do somewhat the same thing.

"A tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave"

“I was coming down the stairs at the front of the bus when a sound hit me like a lightning bolt. It was more than a sound, actually. It was a tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave. Have you ever dealt with skunk spray at very close range? It goes past being a smell — it’s like a wave of high voltage meat that engulfs you so fully that you can’t tell which of your senses you are experiencing. That was the intensity of this sound”
— Guitarist Damian Kulash, on hearing Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ for the first time at age 7. (link)

All in acceleration...all at once

“…The three largest forces on the planet — globalization, Moore’s law and Mother Nature — are all in acceleration, creating an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while superempowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once.”
— Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January 13, 2015 (link)