50 Fortune Cookies: more proverbs, aphorisms and caveats for the bioeconomy, part 1

March 3, 2015 | Jim Lane

Time for more Fortune Cookies – aphorisms and entertainments that came to mind, here in Digestville, as we reported on the fast-growing advanced bioeconomy.

In 2011, we published a collection of 100 “Fortune Cookies” and did another list of 30 in 2012.

It helps to see the humor in a screwy, upside-down world where as Steve Jobs once observed of “the more revolutionary changes”, “They’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.” Or, as we observed two years ago in looking at the financing of renewable fuels:

“You can finance a liquid renewable fuel as long as the market is solid, especially if you are making solids, and the market for solids is liquid, and your liquidity is solid. Adding solids to your liquids will make you more solid, and eventually more liquid. In other words, to get altitude, what you need is a little more grounding. If you know what I mean.”

Back in 2011

With the original collection of 100, you enjoyed items like “Before embarking on a biofuels venture, chew and digest a car, just for practice,” or “If you are thinking long-term, think about it in Mandarin,” or “things go better with Koch.”

Then 30 More

With this follow-up collection, you enjoyed items like “Ask not what the oil majors can do for you, ask what you can do for the oil majors,” and “Beware of that express lane, it usually has limited exits,” or “If you think about it, you never hear an offer for snake oil these days, but there are an awful lot of gasifiers around.” Popular also was “In a Moore’s Law environment, the number of suckers born every minute doubles every two years.”