Strange Loops

Fascinating essay by Matt Gemmell on all things religion & morality:

Indoctrination of children into religious belief systems is one of the great unpunished intellectual and social crimes of human history, and it continues almost unabated to this day. The word “indoctrination”, of course, means teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically – which is exactly what happens. To argue that a four-year-old, taken to Sunday School or such for the first time, is even capable of applying a critical analysis to the dogma is laughable. These children are victims, and the crime is one of morality.

Why does it continue? For the very simple reason that, if we took an enlightened stance and allowed children’s personal development to remain unfettered by religion until they reach adulthood, after which they could then evaluate and decide for themselves, religion all but die out almost overnight. It cannot survive the calm light of reasonable, rational, evolved inspection, by those who have not been infected by its fairy stories whilst too young to defend themselves.

Really a good read & worth the time.

Also, as George Carlin said long ago:

More people have been killed in the name of god than for any other reason.

To Gianforte, though, that kind of improvisation isn’t really bootstrapping. Not the heart of it, anyway. Bootstrapping is both bigger and simpler than saving a dime whenever you can. If you boiled down his philosophy of bootstrapping, it would run something like this: lack of money, employees, equipment — even lack of product — is actually a huge advantage, because it forces the bootstrapper to concentrate on selling to bring cash into the business. There’s an expression that Gianforte likes to quote: “In war you’re either making bullets or shooting bullets.” In other words, for the bootstrapper, business is all about just two things: making product and selling product. It’s not hard to see which one is closer to Gianforte’s heart. “Nothing Happens Until Someone Sells Something” reads the sign in his otherwise spartan office.

Most entrepreneurs go as long as possible NOT believing that.

Awesome memory from Paul Budnitz:

“My dear Ezra,
You son of a bitch. Come back home for the holidays, your mother misses you. As far as I am concerned you can rot with your Shikse wife, but make your mother happy.”

Another gem from Maciej Ceglowski:

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of ‘exit event’ is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

In a perfect world, Maciej and I would sit down with a fine tequila and discuss our ludicrous choice to building a company that makes money.

And make no mistake, bartering away your “one and only youth” (jwz again) working 100-hour weeks on a web site for the promise of a big fat carrot on the end of a stick 80 million lines long, dangled by a fat statesm–venture capitalist, who will make 3x or 10x or 100x more than you, in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that you “succeed”… is clearly stupid.

Really awesome article from Amy Hoy. It’s incredible the load of shit people are willing to believe and never once question the motives of the people doing the shoveling.

Focus: It means saying no, not saying yes.
Simplicity: Make complex things simple.
Courage: Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you.
Best: If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it.

Focus. Simplicity. Courage. Best.

Never confuse simple with easy.

There isn’t one solution. Each retailer will need to find its own unique formula. But I can say with confidence that the retailers that win the future are the ones that start from scratch and figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers.

Advice for not just retail, but all business.

Combine a low burn rate with no debt and a pile of cash, and you have the recipe for a long sustained push at a new product or service.

Just spot on. I try and tell this to wannabe entrepreneurs and get scoffed at 99/100 times.

Rapper Murs on staying true to who you are:

I would love to reach millions, but the type of music I make right now is more like vegan food, so I can only expect vegan people to want to eat in my restaurant. A lot of people make fast food music, I don’t. Until people decide they do not want to be on a fast food diet, then my music is not for them. There is nothing I can do about that because I am not about to create something that is unnatural for me. I have been fortunate enough to make a career out of what I want to do.

I am not a pop star yet, but when I get there I want to be a real person. I’m a vegan, but I may eat chicken one day. I am really peaceful, but want to fight somebody sometimes. I am not perfect. To define something means leaving it in a box and anything outside of that box is unacceptable. My whole career I have tried to break out of boxes. I do want to sell millions of records, but I do not want to be commodified or turn myself into a one-dimensional something. To continue to tell young black kids that they can only be one way does not encourage them to mature or to try new things.