"If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated"

--- D.T. Max, interviewed by Randy Dotinga, Biographer D.T. Max: getting inside David Foster Wallace's head, Christian Science Monitor 27 September 2012

The quote is from the closing paragraph of the interview:

Q: What can we learn from David Foster Wallace? 

A: He's not a cautionary tale about flying close to the sun. His story is much more about an insistence on never being content with who you are or what you've written.

Here's a guy who could have been a well-known literary author and lived in his little literary persona. Instead, David insisted on trying to reach people in this highly unusual and emotional way and show people, as he does in that Kenyon College speech, that he cares about them and how they live their lives.

For a guy like David who wasn't naturally caring, this shows that you can push the edges of your natural comfort zone in order to reach people.

Another lesson is that often it's the simpler truths that carry you forward, and the complex truths that hold people back. If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated.

"Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough. "

--- Charles Kenny, in an opinion piece in Foreign Policy, November 2012, Work More, Make More?

The opening is wonderful:

Declinists, get ready to fret: Sometime this past summer, the average net worth of Canadians surpassed that of Americans. Adding insult to injury, Canadians have universal health care and a lower unemployment rate too.

But you know what really makes it sting? They barely even worked for it. The average employed Canadian works 85 hours fewer each year than the average American -- more than two full workweeks. And that may be the lesson that Canada has for the United States: Working 24/7 isn't the road to prosperity, much less happiness, and there are numbers to prove it. In fact, across rich countries, it turns out there's no close link between the average hours people put in at the office and how much they make. So go ahead: Take that vacation. 

 And here's the quote in context:

But doesn't working harder make you richer? It's true that at the individual level there is a link between working hard and being paid more. Nearly two-thirds of high-earning U.S. workers surveyed for the Center for Work-Life Policy clocked more than 50 hours a week, and one-third logged more than 60 hours. At the other end of the income scale, of course, many of those in poverty can't find a job to put in the hours at all. It's also true, however, that in many low-income families, parents are working two jobs just to stay above the poverty line. Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough.

“Regulators can resist ideas, but they can’t resist technologies”

--- Mohamed Ali El-Moghazi, PhD student at University of Strathclyde, said during the presentation of his paper World Radiocommunication Conference 12: Implications for the Spectrum Eco-System, TPRC 2012, 22 September 2012

I took this to mean that while regulators may try to reject new policy approaches to protect their perceived interests in the status quo, popular technologies like Wi-Fi devices will inevitably flow across borders, bringing about the new world whether they like it or not.