Life changing invention for everybody

When I'm in the city, I miss my daily sauntering around hills and ravines, and seeing more than 10 stars when I look up at the sky at night. When I'm in the country, I miss friends, weird restaurants and buying random stuff at the Asian supermarket.

Someone please invent cheap teleportation and destroy the airline industry! I'd love to spend my days in the city and then blink out to my ranch in the middle of nowhere, Nepal, to sleep in the quiet.

I used to occasionally buy a Powerball ticket when I was desperate and thought I'd never go anywhere. But the real value wasn't the chance at winning, it was all the pleasure it gave me from fantasizing about how I'd start a game company and how I could buy whatever food I wanted and go wherever I wanted. Now I don't buy lottery tickets because I wouldn't want to hear the implication that I didn't earn the money. I'd enjoy a million I made much more than a million I won. It would take a lot more discipline for me to not lose the money made from the lottery vs. business earnings.

There was a little something that bothered me in Randy Pausch's otherwise good Last Lecture, and that was the comment he made about wanting his wife to get remarried after his death. Have some mercy on your wife! You do need to have that discussion, but don't bring it up in front of 200 people! You're going to leave the world and your wife is going to miss you so much, let her know that it's ok to find someone new, but don't cause her pain capriciously.

If you somehow became a billionaire, there wouldn't be enough cool things in the world to buy that would justify trying to make that much money. (But a millionaire, yes.) At that point, you pretty much have to be spending it on inventing new things or the public good (e.g. anti-malarial nets or fighting AIDS). Owning 30 houses would just be silly as you could already stay anywhere in the world and can only be in one place at one time anyway. (And why would you want that much complexity in your life anyway?)

Only companies care about hierarchy, the marketplace just wants cool stuff.

I watched There Will Be Blood tonight and I enjoyed it alot and even laughed at parts, but after that I had to go outside to remind myself that beautiful things do exist in this world and so I listened to the piano and strings from the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack and stared up at the stars for a while.

People hate to lose

A large part of the business world's ability to have people just begging to be employed has to be the employee's attachment to seeing little increases in their checking account every 2 weeks. It actually causes me pain to see my savings balance decrease over time, even though I know I can last another 2-3 years at a good standard of living at this rate (e.g. grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, eating out, occasional vacations).