We're basically after Joe's beer money, and Joe likes his beer, so you better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having his six-pack of beer would be. Jerry Pournelle More Quotes by Jerry Pournelle More Quotes From Jerry Pournelle The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do. Jerry Pournelle investing age dark We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity. I am afraid. I will taste fear until I die. Jerry Pournelle variables eggs fear What man has done, man can aspire to do. Jerry Pournelle aspire done men And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature. Jerry Pournelle literature reason stuff The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club? Jerry Pournelle sitting rose writing Microsoft has gotten so big that it can put out a Preview that will install itself without checking first to see if it has expired. The message here is that Microsoft's time is worth more than yours.... no start-up company could get away with being that arrogant. Jerry Pournelle arrogant microsoft messages In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy] Jerry Pournelle goal law people Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different. Jerry Pournelle different cooking believe I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location. Jerry Pournelle glitches able team The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash. Jerry Pournelle army war way Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed. Jerry Pournelle coffee reading writing And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go. Jerry Pournelle editors lunch giving The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend. Jerry Pournelle cities believe years I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away. Jerry Pournelle comeback mean thinking Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens. Jerry Pournelle poor politics faces You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. Jerry Pournelle epic knowing way Everything takes longer and costs more. Jerry Pournelle cost It's not only possible, but likely that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly everything fundamental. Jerry Pournelle fundamentals people years If you submit a search of the following phrase on Google, you get over four hundred returns, and they are often very strange ones: "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world." Jerry Pournelle information world As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed - but is there not perhaps a cheaper way of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law school graduate a guaranteed salary of $50,000 a year on the condition that he (or she) not practice law. Jerry Pournelle government mean school