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A batch of the best highlights from what Louis's read, .

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.

Hackers & Painters - Big Ideas From the Computer Age

Paul Graham

Information is stochastic. It is neither fully unpredictable nor fully determined.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman

By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers— typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

Jared M. Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

1999, W. W. Norton & Company

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