Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.
Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.
I enjoy it; my experiences abroad have taught me the importance of an open mind and have given me a willingness to wander off the beaten path - not only to keep life interesting, but also to understand in a meaningful way that things do not look the same from every vantage point.
It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.
But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.
In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.
Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.
Normal people with normal lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just take the stuff with sugar in it.
I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.
The challenge of ensuring adequate, nutrient-rich food for an expanding global population is a daunting one, especially given constraints on key resources like water and agricultural land.
I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.
The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane - those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.
A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.
Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.
Since I was 18, I have swum for 50 minutes every day, missing less than one day a year except for a two-week stint when I was training as a cosmonaut in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in March 2009.
What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.
Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.
