Bill, We Left Megalomania Behind

New Online Formats Gutted The Newspaper-ad Business. Why Pore Over Tiny Print Looking For A Job In The Want Ads When You Can Tap A Few Keywords Into Monster.com, Then Click Through And Apply? Why Pay A Steep Per-character Rate For A Classified When You Can Hawk A Whole Garage Full Of Used Stuff On Ebay Or Craigslist For Free?

Another Random Thing I Do Is The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Or Seti. And You May Be Familiar With The Movie 'contact,' Which Sort Of Popularized That. It Turns Out There Are Real People Who Go Out And Search For Extraterrestrials In A Very Scientific Way.

In Politics, Religion And Other Areas Of Culture, People Disagree On The Worth Of Competing Ideas. There Is No Equivalent To The Scientific Method That Can Determine In A Robust Way Which Ideas Match The Real World, And Which Ones Can Be Ruled Out. So Conflicting Ideologies Persist Indefinitely.

The Prize For Ultimate Inefficiency Goes To America. We Have Built In So Many Checks And Balances That Our 'leaders' Are The Most Thoroughly Hogtied Of Any On Earth.

It Is Better To Predict Dramatic Things That Don't Happen Than Boring Things That Do.