"Listen, I have enough trouble tracking my real-life social obligations and long-term grudges, I can’t do it with a bunch of elves or space marines as well."

reminds me of this: "When you are young and free to play games, you can't afford a good PC. When you are finally an adult who can buy whatever he wants, you have no time to play anymore."

is this just inter-generational whining? or a new phenomenon from a generation of gamers growing up. the gamer demographic is now older than ever, and the industry is starting to adapt?

intelligence is no safe-guard against the bias of self-interest

"criticism reflects those who never reconciled themselves to European monetary union — but were quiescent so long as that union’s prime institution acted in German rather than the collective interest"

very relevant suddenly

"The phrase is now used to express the idea that a ruler's wish can be interpreted as a command by his or her subordinates."

the return of hedge funds and the liquidity of ETFs? best of every world?

"“People are looking around for areas to generate some kind of return that is better than what the traditional fixed-income market is offering,” he said."

Privacy Commissioner of Canada's guidelines for fingerprint use

Covert collection: People should be informed if their personal information is being collected.
Cross-matching: Personal information should only be used for the purpose for which it was collected.
Secondary Information: Personal information should only be collected for a clearly identified purpose.

smell test:
Necessity: Is the measure demonstrably necessary to meet a specific need?
Effectiveness: Is it likely to be effective in meeting that need?
Proportionality: Would the loss of privacy be proportionate to the benefit gained?
Alternatives: Is there a less privacy-invasive way of achieving the same end?

guidelines for implementation:
record only summary information
use only for verification, not identification
store locally, rather than in central databases

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
floccinaucinihilipilification: trying to put a firm estimate on certain things is essentially worthless

many unintended consequences of the misuse of metrics that Muller cites are the following:
Inducing people whose performance is measured to divert their efforts to what gets measured;
Promoting short-termism (as in Wall Street's obsessive preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports at the expense of companies' long-term health);
Discouraging innovation and risk-taking;
Sidetracking nonprofit staff members (or corporate employees, for that matter) from focusing on the mission that motivates them; and
** Forcing employees to spend time logging data instead of doing their jobs
Muller concludes The Tyranny of Metrics with a useful checklist of ten questions that any manager should ask when considering the application of metrics at work.

the 'puzzle' of how parts fit with an overall whole presumes clear-cut spatial boundaries among underlying components, yet spatial nonlocality cautions against this view. Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?