“In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”

- HD Thoreau, Life Without Principle

“There must in a theory be some generalization and some specification or diversification, and a good rich key concept guides on both in recognizing the unity in it. The concept of obligation has served this function very well for the area of morality it covers, and so we have some fine theories about that area. But as Aristotelians and Christians, as well as women, know, there is a lot of morality not covered by that concept, a lot of very great importance even for the area where there are obligations.

- Annette C. Baier, What do Women want in a Moral Theory

Users who “live in” Emacs don’t get trapped paying for software upgrades just so they can continue to do their work or use their data.  They don’t get told that their older computers are no longer supported (there’s a ten-year-old laptop in my living room right now that easily runs the latest version of Emacs).  They don’t have to ponder the cost in time and treasure of switching operating systems.  And they generally don’t have to worry about license agreements, proprietary file formats, or DRM.  Emacs—and programs like it—may require a little more from their users, but in return they offer a remarkable escape hatch from proprietary lock-in and planned obsolescence. - Thoughts on Learning Emacs

I will usually prefer to stand outside in the rain if the alternative is a standing under a roof that comes with house rules. That’s why I carry an umbrella and check the weather before I leave my house.

Sometimes I think I’ve woken up in a surreal alternate reality. I was raised in a patriotic glow where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a well-defined, well-reasoned expectation. America is the “land of the free.” I do not think this means what I once thought it meant, particularly if we have no fundamental right to drink the milk from our own cows.

Constitutional law is not my thing, but perhaps it should be. That way I could develop a more cogent argument against the likes of Judge Fielder. As it is, I simply say, “But what of liberty? What of privacy? What of the right to do with my body and my property what I see fit, so long as I do no harm to others?”- Is Your Choice Of Food A Fundamental Right? | Food Renegade

This reads just like a Tea Party epiphany. I hope this blogger can appreciate how many of us are fighting for freedom and autonomy and how diverse we are. We don’t always get along, or even like each other, but there are lots of Americans who want to choose how to live and I hope we can all start to push in the same direction.

“They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”

“Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?”

- Don Norman on Google, via GigaOm

Google Plus is a case of Google becoming what it is. Google’s business strategy has never been dignified, but it used to be largely invisible. There are many things people will go along with, so long as we don’t have to pay too much attention to it. Google Plus provoked some people into paying more attention to Google’s strategy and now what used to be invisible is slowly becoming the dominant fact in the conventional wisdom about Google.

We are living in a world of accelerating addictiveness and increasingly I think the only way (likely lonely, squirming, and eccentric as Paul alludes) we’ll get things done is the continuous directed practice and improvement of willpower, productivity, flow, and exercising thereof.

- Tantek Çelik, The Acceleration of Addictiveness vs Willpower, Productivity, and Flow

It’s an excellent essay, but it could stand to be five times as long and draw out its points with more information and analysis. I plan to spend time diving into the various wiki pages he links to later this weekend.

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

The post lists the top five regrets that people have as they reconcile themselves to their approaching death:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  
• I wish I [hadn't] work[ed] so hard.
  
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  
• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

It’s a great gift to know what people think as they learn to live with their own oncoming mortality. Most of us (the lucky ones) will have to learn to die. Getting to know the territory ahead of time can only be a help to us.

(Found on Wendy McElroy’s blog)