The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.