Tradeoffs Quotes

If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?
We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences
which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef
and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails. ~ Susan Freinkel

In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect.... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works. ~ Bill Gates

Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs. ~ Jesse Jackson

We all faced painful ethical challenges before we even knew how to spell our names. There were tough choices. Tradeoffs. Confusing signals regarding how to live one's life. And here we are now, today, still struggling. Still trying to sort things out. Still trying to work our way through life effectively. About the only thing that has changed is the scope of the problem. There's more at stake now. And we're in a position, as grownups, to do a lot more-good or bad-for ourselves, our organization, our world. But we still must wrestle with our imperfect ethics. ~ Price Pritchett

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further. ~ Steve Wozniak

everything in the area of law enforcement, including criminal law, has at one time or another been handled by the private sector quite adequately, and in some places it's occurring even today. The second reason is that in fact the law and law enforcement are not public goods. Public goods are supposed to be goods that everyone has equal access to and that the private sector will not provide. As I said, the private sector does provide these things, and furthermore the idea of equal access to justice is just not true. We have scarce resources being used in law enforcement and adjudication and prosecution and in punishment, and so the use of these resources for one thing means they are not being effectively used for something else. There are tradeoffs. The vast majority of crimes that are reported to police are never resolved. The vast majority of crimes committed are never reported to police. So the belief that law and law enforcement are public goods simply doesn't stand up to reality. ~ Anonymous

The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Rich Hickey once said programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing...an approach that can lead a project down a path of frustra‐ ted developers and unhappy customers. But as an architect you must consider the tradeoffs of every new library, language, pattern, or approach and quickly make decisions often with incomplete information. ~ Nathaniel Schutta

Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based on subjective value judgements and personal information as they delicately balance their interest, needs and wants. Who is in a better position than they to tailor those choices to best serve their purposes? Yet the politicians believe they can plan the medical market the way you plan a birthday party. ~ John Stossel

Everything is a tradeoff. Everywhere you leave, you leave some good things. The more successful you are, the harder it is to make tradeoffs. That's why some people become successful and then become flat. Be willing to give up income for potential, for opportunity. ~ John C. Maxwell

The art of good decision making is looking forward to and celebrating the tradeoffs, not pretending they don't exist. ~ Seth Godin

At its core, all engineering comes down to making tradeoffs between the perfect and the workable. ~ Katie Hafner

As with Three Mile Island, the hysteria of the media and the political class over the Deepwater spill is likely to lead to increased risk and adverse environmental tradeoffs. ~ Steven F. Hayward

I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited. ~ Barton Gellman