Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
Interpretation
Cars shifted from being objects of love and passion to mere necessities over time.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote reflects on the transformation of cars from symbols of freedom and enjoyment to mundane tools required for everyday life, largely due to urban development. The transition symbolizes a broader trend where the joy of many things gets replaced by practical necessity as society evolves.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the evolution of transportation in urban design.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.
You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?" "Only a man would think of that. It's our job," said Moist. "If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.
People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.
These four policy prescriptions - strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D - should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
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