Jenny’s Reviews > Makers > Status Update

Damn book has gone way too long, but managed to grow on me. I haven't read anything of Doctorow's that's felt *real* since his "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town". I can't explain this book. Except I think I understand there's beauty to be found in human pettiness.

"Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again."

"He ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up. He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there."

"Illegitimi non carborundum."

An unstable market is a functional market. "[Y]ou invent something and charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin-- not the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second case they're just less greedy or less ambitious." Undercutting then drives down prices and creates 'superabundance'.

"We have so much capacity that the trivia[l] expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity. It's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that's by design."