Thomas Sowell in 2002: “Turning out generation after generation of people who do not know what it is to weigh opposing arguments is producing intellectual couch potatoes who know only how to repeat whatever they have been indoctrinated with. They are precisely the kind of gullible people that the Nazis targeted in their years of struggle for power. I think it was Jefferson who said that freedom and ignorance cannot co-exist indefinitely.” [via CafeHayek]
FT: “Paying in cash, for those living in metropolises, is often treated as an anachronism, akin to filing a story with a typewriter or using a payphone. Notes or coins are treated as an inconvenient and dirty product of the past, fit only for tooth fairies and low-level tax avoidance (or in some cases, rather unsophisticated money laundering)…Journalist and author Brett Scott, who previously wrote The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance (2013), takes a rather different line: “We must vigorously assert our right to use cash, and to see that as a political act,” he writes. Cash is not stopping human progress. Rather, it is a roadblock against a greater concentration of data collection and power within Big Tech and Big Finance companies — a combination of players that is pushing us to adopt its own “cloudmoney”.”
WSJ: “The concept of commutativity explains whether sequences make a difference, from slinging bags over your shoulder to adding ingredients in a recipe…Things are said to commute if it doesn’t matter in what order you do them. For example, 2+3 = 3+2, and the order doesn’t matter. Addition of ordinary numbers is commutative, as is multiplication, and this is very helpful for simplifying computations. When we study more complex concepts, however, things might not commute. Take cooking: It doesn’t usually matter in what order you add things such as salt and pepper, but it matters a lot if you’re making something delicate like mayonnaise.”
