#structural

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. ↗

— Alan Kay

#brute #brute force #done #each #egyptian

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides. ↗

— Malcolm Turnbull

#appealing #around #boom #creating #cuts

Those who have a lot of money in Greece invest in housing abroad. It's all immoral. The Greek crisis is structural, but also political. ↗

— Evangelos Venizelos

#also #crisis #greece #greek #housing

The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#history #ideology #mythologies #nature #semiotics

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. ↗

— Barack Obama

#active #avoid #being #black #carefully

My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created. ↗

— Barack Obama

#also #been #being #bleeding #created

Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words. ↗

— Rumi

#celaleddin #inadequacy-of-words #inner #language #mawlana

Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat. ↗

— Mike Davidson

#because #best #competitive #content #designers

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems. ↗

— Jonah Goldberg

#cool #country #declining #direction #dorky

Italy needed structural reforms to become more competitive. ↗

— Mario Monti

#competitive #italy #more #needed #reforms