Socrates' ideas, or rather Plato's representations thereof, belong to a cultural context radically different from our own and have absolutely no relevance. Greece was undergoing a transition from orality to literacy at the time. It was also in the early stages of actual educational institutions. What the distribution of a few manuscripts in that context meant relates to nothing in our modern world.
Not to be a jerk about it, but the misuse of history is characteristic of very pernicious rhetoric.
"Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period of time." The first three are also the things you want to have, well, civilization. You know, clean water, the ability to conduct trade outside of your immediate area, etc. It's about economics, not control.
That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible emphasis on red.
OP described exactly how the author began his article. Your apologetics are tendentious. I hate to break this to you, but the author you have gone out of your way to praise is a very shallow thinker who darts around to create the illusion of a solid argument. It's just sad that you find him thought-provoking. I suggest Critical Reasoning 101 for you.
Keep mind that Google was initially installed as the default search engine years ago, because FF users voted for it to be so. Only after Google saw how many search referrals they then got from FF, did they, that is Google, suggest an actual deal (which paid, incidentally, only a few percent of the market value for those referrals.). That deal doesn't include anything preventing users from changing the defaults.
Consider as well the Awesome Bar. The ability to search your history easily resulted in fewer users going back to Google and generating search referrals. Mozilla implemented it anyway, because it was good for the user.
You seem to be missing the point that overthrows your assertion. Yes, there is still a deal with Google, but Mozilla doesn't care if doing and advocating what's good for the user makes that relationship less and less valuable for Google. They are, in fact, sacrificing potential financial gain for the sake of their principles.
Mozilla has numerous, egregious faults, but this kind of hypocrisy and ethical lapses aren't among them.
Perpetuating the illusion that there are innumerable grave threats that require resource-intensive responses is a useful tool for ensuring that more anti-terrorism money from the federal government gets poured into the city. It's not all incompetence.
It seems to me that if someone is just honestly interested in meeting people and hearing whatever about them, then they are by nature rather social and extroverted and scarcely need advice on how to start conversations.
For most people who aren't social butterflies, conversations are either simple social gestures or they actually have a point. When they have a point, you should ask what interests you, and if it interests them too, then you've found someone with whom a conversation could be worthwhile.
And what exactly do you think you mean by "I think we're reaching the limits of the English language with that one."? The semantic "limit" of the 3rd person plural pronoun is that there is an explicit or implicit, antecedent substantive referent. Your nonsense compounds itself.
I'm sorry, but you generalized about the same billion people and even offered a completely imaginary 90% statistic to boot. And I'm not an outsider, not to the industry, not to web services, not to social networks, not to FB itself. I've been a user and an employee and a consultant for all of those things.
Rules like these aren't really good guide to style though. They are the sort of guidelines suited to curing teenagers of bad habits. That's the problem I have with articles like these. They aren't adult discussions of language; they do not teach effective writing, and do not promote an understanding of language. One should ideally outgrow such pedagogy by one's second year of college.
There's a difference in meaning between "he ran home" and "he was running home." Most people aren't aware enough of the language they use to avoid overusing certain things, but mechanical transformations aren't the answer. One should aspire to learn how language works, and then use it appropriately.
I found this article rather superficial. It touched on a few (very few) points of comparison and ignored a huge number of factors affecting entrepreneurship in Europe.
Rather than waste time expanding on that though, I have a question. In this statement " If we truly believe the next global superstar in tech will hail from Europe, why would we only fund them at one-fifth the amount of their future US competitors?" Who the hell is "we"?
Of course, this question begs the question of whether "we" believe any such thing, because no such idea follows at all from the preceding disquisition. We have several arguments, weak arguments, trying to prop up the idea of a healthy startup ecosystem, and then suddenly we are defining success by the measure of outliers.
But in any event, who is we? The would-be pundits? The startup people in Europe? VC's? The people who give VC's money? Only the last two have any real say in where the money is invested, the VC's much more than the funders.
Do VC's generally believe this? If not, why? Is the claim that they are benighted and too envious. I would find that surprising, given that all the San Hill people I know are hyper-capitalists, to put it mildly, and crunch numbers as readily as most people blink on a windy day.
It's commonplace for VC's to get article and interviews published, given that half of their job is self-marketing, but to be blunt, the attempt to sound like a pundit/prophet is usually much better than this.
Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere.
Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to economic theories, but having societies and cultures, only a slice of which economic theories try to capture. And while I'm at it, the fact that economic theories float above the actual behavior of humans and only thinly capture what they are up to, while floating below any serious philosophy that explain why people should or do anything in the first place.
Well, in his defense, your Bundy and Armstrong examples are just awful, and the bit about whether X is moral or Y is moral is even worse. You've begged the question of what defines morality entirely and replaced a rational basis for evaluation with the assumption that most people you know would consider one thing "worse" than another.
Here's an equally worse argument. If I took a knife away from Ted Bundy, when I encountered him walking around a park at night, wouldn't that be immoral, because taking things that belong to other people is wrong? If I took a syringe of enhancement drugs away from Lance Armstrong, as we both prepared for a race, wouldn't that be immoral.
Your Bundy example implies that the only reason one would or would not kill someone is whether they listen to Ted Bundy. That's a ridiculous mockup. Personally, if Bundy begged me not to kill someone, I'd assume the person was his accomplice. As for Lance, cycling advice isn't moral advice, and it would be perfectly reasonable to refuse to have anything to do with someone, because you found them morally reprehensible. In fact, taking cycling lessons from Lance at this point would simply reinforce the notion that what he did was not seriously wrong and this make one complicit.
In any event, since you are bandying the word "morality" around, let me bring up the issue of "moral authority." If someone's moral authority is suspect, one should not, in general, look to them for moral guidance.
Not to be a jerk about it, but the misuse of history is characteristic of very pernicious rhetoric.