blog.pmarca.com

Every worthwhile contribution to the advancement of motion pictures has been made over a howl of protest from the standpatters, whose favorite refrain has been, 'You can't do that.'

And when we hear that chorus now, we know we must be on the right track.

Ambition!

You must want a big success and then beat it into submission; you must be as ravenous to reach it as the wolf who licks his teeth behind a fleeing rabbit; you must be as mad to win as the man who, with one hand growing cold on the revolver in his pocket, with the other hand pushes his last gold piece on the 'Double-O' at Monte Carlo.

[E]very time you do a movie, in fact, the more experience you get, you can almost say, the less you know. Because the more you know, the more can go wrong. So that can also make you more insecure. But I guess I don't really worry about much. I just try and do the best I can on the set.

[At the time I made Blade Runner], I'm in three movies. I mean [Blade Runner] is my third movie. My first movie is pretty good actually, called The Duellists. And that was criticized for being too beautiful, and you know, I took that to heart. So the next one was Alien, and that was less beautiful but more impressive and more grungy. I was criticized for a lack of character development. I said, "What fucking character development do you need when you've got that son of a bitch on board?"

So I started getting defensive, then realized actually I was in fairly good shape in terms of being a film director, because for the kind of movies that I will do, I will be always very visual. And I won't push it in your face, but I know it's an advantage. I've got a good eye, and I don't know what a good eye means, but I've got a good eye, I think. I can align and see way beforehand, imagine way beforehand, what's going to be. That's good, that's very useful. Because some people don't have that, they [need to have] other talents.

I've had to evolve my capabilities in developing material... Alien I was sent, and I read it and thought, "I know what to do with this," and didn't want to change anything. Because they kept saying, "Want to change anything?" "Nope." They said, "No?" I said, "No. That's it. Let's go." So that was great, because that flew.

And then Blade Runner was the play, which then evolved for eight months every day. [The writer] and I and [the producer] every day talked, talked, talked, talked. As [the producer] was trying to get the financing, the film was growing. And that was interesting because that was a real evolution of working alongside a writer that I really respect. And it was hard for him because sometimes he'd say "Oh fuck." I'd suddenly have this brain wave that comes from a visual notion. We'd get a lot of, "Oh God, I thought we had that worked out." I said, "Yeah, but wouldn't this be great?" And he'd say, "Yeah, but that will mean this, this, this, and this." [And] then there's a domino effect...

"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people," Mr. Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

"I think these things [talking motion pictures] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [televisions] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [rock and roll music] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [hip hop music] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [fast food restaurants] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [bikinis] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [cars] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [typewriters] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [digital music players] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [mobile phones] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [video games] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [search engines] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think this thing [the web] is going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [personal computers] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"If you say 'ah', and put your finger into the mouth of some animal, you have to be sure you can pull it out again," [Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov] said.

"You have to eat well, be well housed, have a screw from time to time, smoke your pipe and drink your coffee in peace."

But hybrid electric cars won’t succeed, [Khosla] said in an interview.

You have to pay $5,000 more on a Prius in order to save half a ton of carbon a year, which is more than most consumers will go for, he explained.

Buying hybrids “is mostly about personal guilt trips.â€

It’s like wealthy investors giving money to “art museums instead of to starving people†in Africa, he said.

To understand fully the crash and panic of 1907, one must consider its context.

A Republican moralist was in the White House.

War was fresh in mind.

Immigration was fueling dramatic changes in society.

New technologies were changing people's everyday lives.

Business consolidators and their Wall Street advisers were creating large, new combinations through mergers and acquisitions, while the government was investigating and prosecuting prominent executives -- led by an aggressive young prosecutor from New York.

The public's attitude toward business leaders, fueled by a muckraking press, was largely negative.

The government itself was becoming increasingly interventionist in society and, in some ways, more intrusive in individual life.

Much of this was stimulated by a postwar economic expansion that, with brief interruptions, had lasted about 50 years.

Bring, then, a sense of irony informed by the present to an understanding of 1907.

Advice to portfolio managers around the globe: please stop referring to "7-standard deviation events" when describing performance.

Whether it's the decline in home prices in real terms, a sudden widening of credit spreads, the impact of too much leverage on previously uncorrelated hedge fund strategies, a sudden shift in liquidity, a selloff in riskier emerging market stocks and bonds despite no change in fundamentals, unexpected outflows from fund investors, problems with credit derivatives or declines in bank credit lines, this has all happened before.

The smartest managers had prepared for volatility.

The good ones will learn from what's happened and make adjustments.

Those that spend too much time explaining why it wasn't likely in the first place fall into the bottom category.

In the early days, start-ups focus on how great it’s going to be when they succeed; but the moment they do, they start talking about how great it was before they did.

Whenever I get this way, I remember the Venerable Bede’s complaint that his eighth century contemporaries had lost the fervor of seventh century monks. Even in the darkest of the Dark Ages, people were nostalgic for...the Dark Ages.

Start-ups are like medieval monasteries: always convinced that paradise is just ahead or that things only recently got worse. If you can begin to enjoy the process of building a start-up rather than the outcome, you'll be a better leader.

Brainstorming [is] used in nearly all of the world's largeset companies, nonprofits, and government organizations. And the reasons seem obvious... "The average person can think of twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone."... But is it true?

In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called "real groups" since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let "virtual groups" of four people generate ideas around the "thumb problem", but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies... They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups...

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly. In a [1987 study, researchers] concluded that brainstorming groups have never outperformed virtual groups. Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over the world, real groups have never once been shown to be more productive than virtual groups. In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the group's individuals had [worked] alone.

In addition, in the studies where the quality of ideas was measured, researchers found that the total number of good ideas was much higher in virtual groups than in real groups.

By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the [US government] farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities -- or to the United States.

The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since NAFTA is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s.

(More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.)

You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.

Long ago, Socrates described some second thoughts he had about the new and questionable technology called a "book". He thought it had several weaknesses. A book could not adjust what it was saying, as a living person would, to what would be appropriate for certain listeners or specific times or places. In addition, a book could not be interactive, as in a conversation or dialogue between persons. And finally, according to Socrates, in a book the written words "seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."

"It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career. It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

Maybe they're outside in the garden. They could be playing softball. Or perhaps they're just plain bored.

In TV's worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.

Everyone has a theory to explain the plummeting ratings: early Daylight Savings Time, more reruns, bad shows, more shows being recorded or downloaded or streamed.

Scariest of all for the networks, however, is the idea that many people are now making their own television schedules.

Ballmer: “Don’t think the early days of Microsoft, when I joined, were so great. We didn’t have great agility.â€

Mossberg: “What, it was small but ossified?â€

Ballmer: “The people we had weren’t as good — they just weren’t pushing as much.â€

Mossberg: “Like Paul Allen?â€

Ballmer: “Paul was good. Bill was good. Four out of 30 were good — and believe me, the rest are gone.â€

Dash's new Web venture is BlockSavvy, a site aimed at what he dubs the "urban-lifestyle demographic." When I ask what motivated this endeavor, Dash answers bluntly, "Money." When I ask him to elaborate, he turns to [partner Kareem "Biggs"] Burke, who explains, "After MySpace sold for $580 million, we said, damn, we gotta get us some of that."