First you get a logo (Thanks, Deb) then everything else. Thing One in the construction phase is to move the pipes around in the bathroom, cut a new door and seal off the old one. The plumbing and carpentry phase has begun. It is also the permitting phase. I guess Thing 0 was putting in a water filter system that removes the arsenic and softens the water. Now I'm waiting on the retest results from that to send in to the inspection people for getting a license. And I'm waiting on a quote from the fire alarm people. There is a lot of paper work and waiting in this stage. I have found the state people in the Fire Marshall's office and the Health Department very accessible and helpful.

The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills. The corollary of that proposition, he argued, is that centers of high skill (i.e., civilizations) tend to upset their neighbors by exposing them to attractive novelties. Less-skilled peoples round about are then impelled to try to make those novelties their own so as to attain for themselves the wealth, power, truth, and beauty that civilized skills confer on their possessors. Yet such efforts provoke a painful ambivalence between the drive to imitate and an equally fervent desire to preserve the customs and institutions that distinguish the would-be borrowers from the corruptions and injustices that also inhere in civilized life.

Specifically, those societies that are most open to flows of trade, information, finance, culture, or education, and those most willing to learn from them and contribute to them, are the ones most likely to thrive in the age of accelerations. Those that can't will struggle.

Warning: in the age of accelerations, if a society doesn't build floors under people, many will reach for a wall--no matter how self-defeating that would be.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment

As Warren Buffett says, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” All of this withdrawal of support from the big powers and these changes in the global economy were exposing who actually had built a domestic economy and who was just riding on the agricultural commodity and oil booms. Turns out, a lot of countries were buck naked.

diversity spurs economic development and homogeneity slows it down … The evidence is mounting that geographical openness and cultural diversity and tolerance are not by-products but key drivers of economic progress.

Al Qaeda and ISIS, using high-density fossil fuels, are trying to wipe out all that diversity and create a monoculture that is enormously susceptible to conspiracy theories and diseased ideas. This has left that region barren, weak and unhealthy for all its inhabitants. I would argue the same thing happened to the Republican Party in America. The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts). And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives. But in recent years the Tea Party and other hyperconservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas: climate change is a hoax; evolution never happened; we don’t need immigration reform. All of this weakened the G.O.P.’s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.

In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.

we are wired to be tribal, but we are not hardwired to view our tribe in the narrowest way possible.

the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being