You've Lost Sight

Let's just take it from the perspective of the parent why this is a -- why this is just a stupid thing to do.  Now, instead of your child getting two shots, she has to get six shots.  Instead of ... you missing work to take your child to the doctor two times, you're doing it six times, and instead of the insurance company paying for two visits, it's now paying for six visits.  Now this is going to drive up the cost of your life, inconvenience you tremendously, and your child's getting six jabs, not two.  As a physician, but as a parent -- as a human -- I know that all that is wrong for the family.

This is why the president's poll numbers are down, because you've lost sight of affordability for the parent, you've lost sight of the convenience for the American family, you've lost sight of that which is driving higher costs in healthcare.

-- Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in an interview on ABC's "This Week"  discussing Trump's order to split the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine into 3 separate shots (16 August 2026)

Strictly Speaking

Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

-- Shunryu Suzuki (1904 - 1971). Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, quoted in Zen Millionaire : The Investor's Guide to the "Other Side" (2007) by Paul B. Farrell

How Much Does One Imagine

How much does one imagine, how much observe?  One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water.

-- Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE (1907 - 1997), English writer, magistrate, and government adviser, The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) Ch. 15

Market Incentives

It's easy to conflate technology problems with capitalism problems. Back in 2021, science-fiction writer and AI commentator Ted Chiang said that "most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism."  It's not the tech per se; it's who controls it and how it could be used against us.

Imagine an AI assistant for a doctor.  We can imagine it affecting the profession in one of two ways.  The AI could give a doctor more time to do the human parts of their job: to spend more time with their patients, to listen more closely to their needs, to explain things more fully.  Or the managers of the medical practice could give that doctor five times the patients -- and fire the other four.  Which way it would go is not a question of technology.  It's a question of market incentives.

-- Nathan Sanders & Bruce Schneier, "Separating AI's Technological Problems From its Capitalism Problems" at TechPolicy.press (11 August 2026)

A Great Aptitude

Genius is nothing else than a great aptitude for patience.

-- Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 1788), French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and author, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Once A Year

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.  The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799), German scientist, satirist, and philosopher, Aphorisms (1779-1788)

I Cannot Be Sure

I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong.

-- Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006), American economist, "Say 'No' to Intolerance", Liberty magazine, vol. 4, no. 6, (July 1991) pp. 17-20