Parenting with a story - Excerpts

Read the book here

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. —HOWARD GODDARD

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." - Hannah Arendt

As Emma explains, one of the rules they established early on for all three of their children was this: “We weren’t allowed to have toys with batteries or that needed electricity.” Many kids would consider that cruel and unusual punishment. But to Emma, that’s just the way things were.
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So how did they entertain themselves? “We had to be more creative. I played with Lincoln Logs and paper dolls I made. We would go for walks and collect rocks. Then we painted the rocks into different animals and created whole scenes with them. I even remember my brother making wallets out of duct tape.

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But the rule may have had an even longer-term impact. All three children grew up to pursue a career in some kind of creative design.

Review - From Zero to One by Peter Thiel

After a long time I have read a book which offers really fresh points of view. Though the cover says "Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future", a large part of the book - esp the first half - is not about startups. It's about how to think different and offers some very strong contrarian views about the prevailing wisdom.

A must read for its novelty.

When Google Met WikiLeaks - Excerpts

1. It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. http://archive.is/ndbmj
   
2. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as “the free market”: The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
   
3. You can have a lot of political “change” in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not.
   
4. WikiLeaks is funded by donations from supporters. In December 2010 major banking and financial institutions, including VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and Bank of America, bowed to unofficial US pressure and began to deny financial services to WikiLeaks. They blocked bank transfers and all donations made with major credit cards. While these are American institutions, their ubiquity in world finance meant that willing donors in both America and around the world were denied the option of sending money to WikiLeaks to support its publishing activities.
   
5. Zimmermann - The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier. (not an excerpt but related)