“The life of a microcelebrity resembles the fate of Sisyphus. After every tour I feel exhausted but empowered by the thought that a few people really care a lot about this music. Yet, a few months later all is quiet again and CD/download sales slow down again.

I don’t want to be a tadpole in a shrinking puddle. When the audience is this small, one consequence of specialization is extinction.

“Writing holds a central place in the lives of teens. 86 percent consider good writing skills essential to their future success. 93 percent said that they write for themselves outside of school. 57 percent say they revise and edit more when they write using a computer. But 63 percent say using computers to write makes no difference in the quality of the writing they produce.

“It’s much easier to write code than to read and understand it. Anybody who maintains a legacy codebase has to figure out what the code wants to do, and then to contort it until it does something close enough. The only hope for preventing this endless rewriting is to somehow capture the problem in the solution. Rather than coding up wondrous new solutions maybe we should devote our time to carefully describing problems in our code.

“When companies think about extending their business into some new area, their first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?

“I taught Bethany, my oldest daughter, TDD as her first programming style when she was about age 12. She thinks you can’t type in code unless there is a broken test. The rest of us have to muddle through reminding ourselves to write the tests.

“In Quantum Mechanics, having two ways to do something can make it less likely to happen, not more.

“Working-class unions and middle-class environmentalists are very different organizations.

The middle class is prone to seeing the working class as rigid, self-interested, narrow, uninformed, parochial, and conflict oriented. The working class tends to perceive the middle class as moralistic, intellectual, more talk than action, lacking commonsense, and naïve about power.

Each side has a different standard for evaluating information. The working class trusts experience, and the middle class believes in research and systematic study. The result is a wide gulf in understandings of nature, sustainability, economics, and human conduct.

They seek change differently. The working class seeks to build power to confront external threats, while the middle class hopes to change people’s motivations, ideas, and morality.

The middle class tends to have greater faith in the ability of bureaucratic institutions to accomplish its goals. The working class, by contrast, is often the weakest party in conflicts and tends to pay the costs of many political and economic decisions. Its strategies reflect both this vulnerability and the interpretation of politics as a conflict about interests.