Affordable Clothes Quotes

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment.  The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become. As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper.  She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale. Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?” I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.  “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”             I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”  I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank. “Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”   I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”   So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.

What's this outfit? You can't afford clothes? Are you wearing other peoples?" Helen Plum

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.

I didn’t need another cat. At this point in my brilliant career as an itinerant educator I could barely afford to feed myself. But then, no one ever needs a cat these days. That’s not why we have cats. We have cats because they amuse us and because otherwise our clothes would lack the texture only cat hair can provide.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can't out-consume one another because they can't afford it, but they can out-taste one another.

With King Lords, we had a whole bunch of folks who had our backs, no matter what. They bought us clothes and shit our momma couldn’t afford and always made sure we ate.

one reason to have a Total Money Makeover is to build wealth that allows you to have fun. So have some fun! Taking your family, even the extended ones, on a seven-day cruise, buying large diamonds, or even buying a new car are things you can afford to do when you have millions of dollars. You can afford to do these things because when you do them, your money position is hardly even affected. If you like travel, travel. If you like clothes, buy some. I am releasing you to have some fun with your money, because money is to be enjoyed. That guilt-free enjoyment is one of the three reasons to have a Total Money Makeover.

White people love rock climbing almost more than they love camping. This is because the activity affords them the opportunity to be outside, to use a carabiner for something other than their keys, and to purchase a whole new set of expensive activity-specific clothing and accessories.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think of nothing to do but walk downtown, check out the Bon Marche for clothes she could not afford, buy a cracked crab for dinner and take a taxi home.

Only once we are clothed and fed can we afford to be polite.

I bout a bag of tortilla chips that was almost as big as me. And I bought some work clothes and a pair of Adidas that I could never imagine affording before in my life. So far, America was very impressive.

The stock that is laid out in a house, if it is to be the dwelling-house of the proprietor, ceases from that moment to serve in the function of a capital, or to afford any revenue to its owner. A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant; and though it is, no doubt, extremely useful to him, it is as his clothes and household furniture are useful to him, which, however, make a part of his expense, and not of his revenue.

If we wanted new clothes, we knew exactly how much he could spare and what cuts would have to be made elsewhere. The result was that we simply did not desire what we couldn't afford. When you have no choice, you have no discontent, either.

Single parents were expected to work full time yet stay home with our kids, be educated yet not abuse federal assistance, and somehow afford rent, bills, food, clothes, and gas by ourselves. And heaven forbid we ever need to hold up a register line to pull out a WIC check.

Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. ... ... The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. (P. 128)

When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder, the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old, but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You’d hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr. Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.

I wasted time scrolling through the photos and errant musings of people I should have long since forgotten, and exchanged endless, searching emails with friends, in which we swapped inexpert professional and dating advice. I read the online archives of literary magazines that no longer existed, digitally window-shopped for clothing I could not afford, and created and abandoned private, aspirational blogs with names like A Meaningful Life, in the vain hope that they might push me closer to leading one.

They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety-

Think about it: If you have saved just enough to have your own house, your own car, a modicum of income to pay for food, clothes, and a few conveniences, and your everyday responsibilities start and end only with yourself… You can afford not to do anything outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping. Time would be an endless, white blanket. Without folds and pleats or sudden rips. Monday would look like Sunday, going sans adrenaline, slow, so slow and so unnoticed. Flowing, flowing, time is flowing in phrases, in sentences, in talk exchanges of people that come as pictures and videos, appearing, disappearing, in the safe, distant walls of Facebook. Dial fast food for a pizza, pasta, a burger or a salad. Cooking is for those with entire families to feed. The sala is well appointed. A day-maid comes to clean. Quietly, quietly she dusts a glass figurine here, the flat TV there. No words, just a ho-hum and then she leaves as silently as she came. Press the shower knob and water comes as rain. A TV remote conjures news and movies and soaps. And always, always, there’s the internet for uncomplaining company. Outside, little boys and girls trudge along barefoot. Their tinny, whiny voices climb up your windowsill asking for food. You see them. They don’t see you. The same way the vote-hungry politicians, the power-mad rich, the hey-did-you-know people from newsrooms, and the perpetually angry activists don’t see you. Safely ensconced in your tower of concrete, you retreat. Uncaring and old./HOW EASY IT IS NOT TO CARE

It occurred to me that I should do more for other people. I never once considered that there were people just down the road who cannot afford proper clothing, or care for their children.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

She would later realize that these were signs that he truly came from wealth: how rarely he wore expensive clothes even though he could afford to, how little he talked about his father or his inheritance.

Only once one is clothed and fed does one learn manners.’ In the end, you can’t have morals or patriotism on an empty stomach. If you’re too busy looking after yourself, you can’t afford to look after others.

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits.

Sometimes just walking behind a two-parent family on a sidewalk could trigger feelings of shame from being alone. I zeroed in on them -- dressed in clothes I could never afford, diaper bag carefully packed into an expensive jogging stroller. Those moms could say things that I never could: "Honey, could you take this?" or "Here, can you hold her for a second?" The child could go from one parent's arms to the other's.

Even before World War II, some parents began to redefine love. But they could usually afford to do that only after their last child was “married off,” as with Tevye and Golde of Fiddler on the Roof.1 TEVYE: Golde. . . . Do you love me? GOLDE: Do I love you? For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, Cooked your meals, cleaned your house, Given you children, milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about Love right now? . . . TEVYE: But my father and my mother Said we’d learn to love each other. . . . Do you love me? GOLDE: For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him Fought with him, starved with him Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deems a family that is spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing to be “cost burdened,” at risk of having too little money for food, clothing, and other essential expenses. Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.

If we wanted new clothes, we knew exactly how much he could spare and what cuts would have robe made elsewhere. The result was that we simply did not desire what we couldn't afford. When you have no choice, you have no discontent, either.

took the sculls again. ‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity. ‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly; ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbe erlemonadesodawater—’ ‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Mole in ecstacies: ‘This is too much!’ ‘Do you really think so?’ enquired the Rat seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut itvery fine!’ The Mole never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long waking dreams. The Water Rat, like the good little fellow he was, sculled steadily on and forebore to disturb him. ‘I like your clothes awfully, old chap,’ he remarked after some half an hour or so had passed. ‘I’m going to get a black velvet smoking-suit myself some day, as soon as I can afford it.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. ‘You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!

The researchers discovered that money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that, beyond a certain point, your happiness levels off. The happiness that money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent—it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect.

I will be making my own choices in life. I know you say you want the best for us, but the best isn't whether or not we are able to afford clothing that suits our position. The best is when you find someone you love, who loves you back, and you decide you want to spend your lives together.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.’ Ellen Goodman

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England; Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silent by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed; What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled; and by this pattern Not one of you should live an aged man, For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With self same hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another.... Say now the king Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you, whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give your harbour? go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England, Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper, That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made you, nor that the claimants Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them, what would you think To be thus used? this is the strangers case; And this your mountainish inhumanity.

She must not give herself up as hopeless, as many a plain girl does, scrape her hair back into an unsymmetrical bundle, have her clothes "cut out with a hatchet and put on with a pitchfork," ill-use her skin with coarse soaps and neglect her figure. Only a beauty may dare all this, and even the loveliest cannot afford it.

A part of all you earn is yours to keep. It should be not less than a tenth no matter how little you earn. It can be as much more as you can afford. Pay yourself first. Do not buy from the clothes- maker and the sandal-maker more than you can pay out of the rest and still have enough for food and charity and penance to the gods.

With the fate of Roe v. Wade now hanging in the balance, I'm calling for a special 'pro-life tax.' If the fervent prayers of the religious right are answered and abortion is banned, let's take it a step further. All good Christians should legally be required to pony up; share the financial burden of raising an unwanted child. That's right: put your money where your Bible is. I'm not just talking about paying for food and shelter or even a college education. All those who advocate for driving a stake through the heart of a woman's right to choose must help bear the financial burden of that child's upbringing. They must be legally as well as morally bound to provide the child brought into this world at their insistence with decent clothes to wear; a toy to play with; a bicycle to ride -- even if they don't consider these things 'necessities.' Pro-lifers must be required to provide each child with all those things they would consider 'necessary' for their own children. Once the kid is out of the womb, don't wash your hands and declare 'Mission Accomplished!' It doesn't end there. If you insist that every pregnancy be carried to term, then you'd better be willing to pay the freight for the biological parents who can't afford to. And -- like the good Christians that you are -- should do so without complaint.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair; but who said history was fair?

usually rents a white dress that’s been worn hundreds of times. The man wears something clean that’s not mining clothes. They fill out some forms at the Justice Building and are assigned a house. Family and friends gather for a meal or bit of cake, if it can be afforded. Even if it can’t, there’s always a traditional song we sing as the new couple

As we use our last reserves of petroleum and pollute our world drilling for oil in areas where an “accident” can quickly become an enormous ecological disaster; as our air becomes more and more polluted and unhealthy; as food, housing, energy, transportation, and clothing become less and less affordable; what can save the Earth and civilization? Hemp can!

Not all of us are born with fingers that move like fucking Ferraris, homie,” he rants in good humour. ​“Some of us are just fuck-ups who look normal and wear shitty clothes because we can’t afford good ones, and we’re angry and we just wanna take out our angst and shit with a guitar. I’m not inspired by how good you are, it’s almost like the opposite. I wanna feel you. "...the kids that I went to school with fucking hated me, and I’d worn the same clothes for five days, and I was tall, skinny and didn’t fit in. I was a basement; where the fuck was I going to learn how to play like Steve Vai? I couldn’t! I was broke. No-one gave a fuck about me. Give me three chords, though, and tell me to show you how I feel, and I bet you I will.

Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker’s load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a popular saying of the day.

I jumped up, my hands in the air. “Yes!” Lend laughed. “Okay, looks like I need to make a run to the grocery store. Do faeries hate wheat or white bread more, you think?” “Get bread with raisins,” I said. “Everyone hates raisins.” Jack was bouncing, obviously excited. “That’s all we need, right?” “We need Reth.” “No,” Lend and Jack whined in unison. “Come on, you two. Reth knows the Faerie Realms better than you do. Jack, you didn’t see where the people were; it might take you a while to find them, and that’s time we can’t afford to lose. And Reth’s getting worse; being there might give him more time.” Lend scowled, grabbing the car keys off the counter. “Fine. But I’m really getting tired of his stupid smirk and prissy clothes.” Jack nodded. “And his voice that sounds like it’d even taste good. Really, it’s overkill. Best to have only a few absolutely perfect traits—for example, my hair and eyes and sparkling personality—so you don’t overwhelm them.” “Aww, are you guys jealous of how pretty Reth is? That’s kind of adorable.” “You know I could look exactly like him,” Lend said, frowning darkly. “Please for the love of all that is good and holy, never, ever wear Reth. That’s the stuff of nightmares.” That brightened his face a bit and he left me with a lingering kiss and a promise to be back with every loaf of bread we could carry. “Well, go find your stupid faerie boyfriend,” Jack said, lying down on top of the counter and drumming his fingers on his stomach. “I haven’t filled my quota for pissing off the Dark Court yet this week.” “We are going to blow your quote sky high.” He held up a hand and I high-fived him as I walked past and out of the house toward the trail. Yet again. I should have invested in a dirt bike or something given the amount of mileage I was getting out of the path between the house and the pond.

Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson New York Post, August 3, 2022 In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs. People care a lot about social status. In fact, research indicates that respect and admiration from our peers are even more important than money for our sense of well-being. ...as trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods. The upper classes have found a clever solution to this problem: luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class. ‘Upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class’ ... White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status. When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. ... like with diamond rings or designer clothes of old, upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class. These beliefs, in turn, produce real, tangible consequences for disadvantaged people, further widening the divide.

1) Leopardskin is always a neutral. 2) You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots. 3) Contrary to popular opinion, a belt is often not a good friend to a lady. Indeed, in many circumstances, it acts merely as a visual aid to help the onlooker settle the question: "Which half is fatter - the bottom or the top?" 4) Bright red is a neutral. 5) Sellotape is NOT strong enough to mend a hole in the crotch of a pair of tights. 6) You should NOT buy an outfit if you have to strike a sexy pose in the changing-room mirror to make it look good. On the other hand, if you immediately start dancing the minute you put it on, buy it, however much it costs: unless it's lots, in which case, you can't, so don't. Fashion magazines will NEVER say, "Actually, don't buy it if you can't afford it." Neither will your friends. I am probably the only person who will EVER say it to you. You're welcome.

When America was discovered," said the Radical member--and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. The duchess sighed and exercised her privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance nowadays. It is most unfair." "Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected." "Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the duchess vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same." "They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes. "Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess. "They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.

PRACTICE Today, wear your oldest and least presentable clothes, no matter what's on the schedule. Notice how people react. Think about what it is like to move about in a consumerist society when you cannot afford to keep up appearances. Pray for awareness regarding your own sense of self-worth when you are not “looking your best.” Ask to be freed up from this unnecessary self-preoccupation. Notice how the flowers grow. They do not toil or spin. But I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of them. (Lk 12:27)

At the same time that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers were urged to pipe Mozart into their wombs when they're pregnant so their kids would come out perfectly tuned, the government told poor mothers to get the hell out of the house and get to work--no more children's aid for them. Mothers like us--with health care, laptops, and Cuisinarts--are supposed to replicate the immaculate bedrooms we see in Pottery Barn Kids catalogs, with their designer sheets and quilts, one toy and one stuffed animal atop a gleaming white dresser, and a white rug on the floor that has never been exposed to the shavings from hamster cages, Magic Markers accidentally dropped with their caps off, or Welche's grape juice.... we've been encouraged to turn our backs on other mothers who pick their kids' clothes out of other people's trash and sometimes can't buy a can of beans to feed them. How has it come to seem perfectly reasonable--even justified-- that one class of mother is suppoed to sew her baby's diapers out of Egyptian cotton from that portion of the Nile blessed by the god Osiris while another class of mother can't afford a single baby aspirin?

Symbolic interactionists stress that to understand poverty we must focus on what poverty means to people. When people evaluate where they are in life, they compare themselves with others. In some rural areas, simple marginal living is the norm, and people living in these circumstances don’t feel poor. But in Leslie’s cosmopolitan circle, people can feel deprived if they cannot afford the latest upscale designer clothing from their favorite boutique. The meaning of poverty, then, is relative: What poverty is differs from group to group within the same society, as well as from culture to culture and from one era to the next.

So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash, the cane—but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner.

I'm the one who's different." "A princess, you mean?" She pinched his arm lightly as the carriage turned onto rue Dauphine. "Not a princess." Belle's refusal to take the title marriage to Lio would have afforded her was a touchy subject between them. He mercifully let it go. "But certainly not the girl you were then." She turned her attention to the wallpapered panel of the carriage, tracing the embossed flowers with the tip of her finger, unwilling to let him see her smile falter once more. She didn't know how to explain that she would always be that girl, that no titles or fine clothing would change her. In her bones, she was a poor, provincial peasant who had risen far above her station.

A young person for Monsieur Jagiello,’ said the guard, with a grin. He stood away from the door, and there was the young person, holding a cloth-covered basket, blushing and hanging her pretty head. The others walked away to the window and talked in what they meant to be a detached, natural way; but few could help stealing glances at the maiden, and none could fail to hear Jagiello cry, ‘But my dear, dear Mademoiselle, I asked for black pudding and apples, no more. And here is foie gras, a gratin of lobster, a partridge, three kinds of cheese, two kinds of wine, a strawberry tart . . . ’ ‘I made it myself,’ said the young person. ‘I am sure it is wonderfully good: but it is much more than I can ever afford.’ ‘You must keep up your strength. You can pay for it later – or in some other way – or however you like.’ ‘But how?’ asked Jagiello, in honest amazement. ‘By a note of hand, do you mean?’ ‘Pray step into the passage,’ said she, pinker still. ‘There you are again,’ said Jack, drawing Stephen into another room. ‘Yesterday it was a thundering great patty, with truffles; and tomorrow we shall see a wedding-cake for his pudding, no doubt. What they see in him I cannot conceive. Why Jagiello, and the others ignored? Here is Fenton, for example, a fine upstanding fellow with side-whiskers that are the pride of the service – with a beard as thick as a coconut – has to shave twice a day – as strong as a horse, and a very fair seaman; but there are no patties for him.

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn’t afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines.

Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.

Albertine’s taste for these pretty things was much sharper than the Duchesse’s, because, like any obstacle placed in the way of possession (like my illness, which made travel so difficult and so desirable for me), poverty, more generous in this than riches, gives women something more than the clothes they cannot buy: the desire for these clothes, which is the true way, detailed, thorough, of getting to know them. She, because she could not afford to buy these things herself, and I, because by having them made for her I was trying to please her, were like students who know every detail of the pictures they long to go and see in Dresden or Vienna. Meanwhile rich women, surrounded by their countless hats and dresses, are like people who, having had no desire to visit a museum, find there only sensations of dizziness, fatigue and boredom.

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford, the movies, sharp clothes, and up to Cadillacs. Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them, as the lowest common denominator. I do not mean that this is not a reasonable compensation, like the Englishman’s liquor and the Irishman’s betting on the horses. Everybody has got to have something, and so poor people show off and feel big by means of the standard of living. But in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Girls who chase boys, who twirl their hair and walk through clouds of chain-store perfume, learning their allure. Girls who like books, who revel in their solitude, and lonely girls who don't; girls who eat, and girls who don't. Girls with piercings, tattoos, scars. Angry girls, who bare their teeth and scratch at their arms. Unironic boy-band, pink-clad girls, who scream and wail and live in every breath. Girls who read Vogue and spend their Saturdays with jealous hands on clothes their allowances won't afford. Girls who long to be mothers, and their own mothers who long for their youth. Art girls. Science girls. Girls who'll make it out alive. Girls who won't. And then, there are invisible girls: the ones nobody thinks to be afraid of. The girls who hide in plain sight, flirting and giggling; girls for whom sugar and spice is a mask. Girls who spark matches and spill battery acid on skin. Girls for whom rules do not apply.

It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. ....... The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat. The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

Most of my friends put their preferred pronoun in their Instagram bios—he/she, him/her, they/their—but I respond to any and all of them. I like to think of it as collecting pronouns: the more I get, the more fun I’m having. To get the obvious out of the way, because that’s apparently important to people, I think of myself as post-gender. I was trying to figure out how to explain that because sometimes it’s a paragraph and sometimes it’s a term paper depending on who I’m talking to, and I have no idea who will be reading this in the aftermath. Then I noticed that one of my fellow passengers has a cat with him, and that’s perfect. When you visit a friend and find they have a cat, you just see it as a cat in all its pure catness, it doesn’t require further definition. You’ll probably get a name, and if you ask, whether it was born male or female, but even after you have that information you still don’t think of it any differently. It’s not a He-Cat or a She-Cat or a They-Cat. It’s just a cat. And unless the cat’s name has any gender-specific connotations you’ll probably forget pretty fast which gender it was born into. My name is Theo, and by that logic, I am a cat. What I was or was not born into has nothing to do with how I see myself. It’s not about going from one gender to another, or suggesting that they don’t exist. Some of my friends say that the moment you talk about gender you invalidate the conversation because you’re accepting the limits of outmoded paradigms, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I just think gender shouldn’t matter. If you’re a man, aren’t there moments when you feel more female, like when you’re listening to music, or your cheek is being gently stroked, or you see a spectacularly handsome man walk into the room? If you’re a woman, aren’t there moments when you feel more male, when you have to be strong in the face of conflict, or stand behind your opinion, or when a spectacularly beautiful woman walks into the room? Well, in those moments, you are all of those things, so why deny that part of yourself? For me, it’s not about being binary or non-binary. It’s about moving the needle to the center of the dial and accepting all definitions as equally true while remaining free to shift in emphasis from moment to moment. It’s about being a Person, not a She-Person or a He-Person or a They-Person. (...) When you go into a clothing store, you don’t just go to the “one size fits all” rack. You look for clothes that fit your waist, hips, legs, chest, and neck, clothes that complement your form and shape, and reflect not just how you see yourself but how you want to be seen by others. If it’s still not quite right, and you can afford it, you get the clothes tailored to fit exactly who you are. That’s what I’m doing. Post-gender is one term for it. Another might be tailored gender. Maybe bespoke gender. But definitely not one-size-fits-all. The world doesn’t get to decide what best fits who I am and how I choose to be seen. I do.

she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her. Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe. For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious. Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week. Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did. In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world. There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one. Walmart is the largest employer in the country. More than a million and a half Americans are working to make this corporation among the most profitable in the world. Meanwhile, Gina points out that at her store, “almost all the young people are on food stamps.” And it’s not just her store. Across the country, Walmart pays such low wages that many of its employees rely on food stamps, rent assistance, Medicaid, and a mix of other government benefits, just to stay out of poverty. The

The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move to an integrated neighborhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future? During the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, a nightclub comic observed that, had the demonstrators been served, some of them could not have paid for the meal. Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants, or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even to take his wife out to dine? Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right. The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities. In asking for something special, the Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man. He does not want to be given a job he cannot handle. Neither, however, does he want to be told that there is no place where he can be trained to handle it. So with equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip him to seize it. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for. Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow. Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up. Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

If we take God’s Word seriously, we should avoid debt when possible. In those rare cases where we go into debt, we should make every effort to get out as soon as we can. We should never undertake debt without prayerful consideration and wise counsel. Our questions should be, Why go into debt? Is the risk called for? Will the benefits of becoming servants to the lender really outweigh the costs? What should we ask ourselves before going into debt? Before we incur debt, we should ask ourselves some basic spiritual questions: Is the fact that I don’t have enough resources to pay cash for something God’s way of telling me it isn’t his will for me to buy it? Or is it possible that this thing may have been God’s will but poor choices put me in a position where I can’t afford to buy it? Wouldn’t I do better to learn God’s lesson by foregoing it until—by his provision and my diligence—I save enough money to buy it? What I would call the “debt mentality” is a distorted perspective that involves invalid assumptions: • We need more than God has given us. • God doesn’t know best what our needs are. • God has failed to provide for our needs, forcing us to take matters into our own hands. • If God doesn’t come through the way we think he should, we can find another way. • Just because today’s income is sufficient to make our debt payments, tomorrow’s will be too (i.e., our circumstances won’t change). Those with convictions against borrowing will normally find ways to avoid it. Those without a firm conviction against going into debt will inevitably find the “need” to borrow. The best credit risks are those who won’t borrow in the first place. The more you’re inclined to go into debt, the more probable it is that you shouldn’t. Ask yourself, “Is the money I’ll be obligated to repay worth the value I’ll receive by getting the money or possessions now? When it comes time for me to repay my debt, what new needs will I have that my debt will keep me from meeting? Or what new wants will I have that will tempt me to go further into debt?” Consider these statements of God’s Word: • “True godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can’t take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content” (1 Timothy 6:6-8). • “Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). • “My child, don’t lose sight of common sense and discernment. Hang on to them, for they will refresh your soul. They are like jewels on a necklace. They keep you safe on your way, and your feet will not stumble. You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly. You need not be afraid of sudden disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the LORD is your security. He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap” (Proverbs 3:21-26). • “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

His first coming He was wrapped in swadding clothes. In His second coming He will be clothed royally in a robe dipped in blood. common people. In His second coming He will be accompanied by the massive armies of heaven. In His first coming the door of the inn was closed to Him. In His second coming the door of the heavens will be opened to Him. In His first coming His voice was the tiny cry of a baby. In His second coming His voice will thunder as the sound of many waters. In His first coming, He was the lamp of God who came bringing salvation. In His second coming, He will be the Lion of the tribe of Judah who comes bringing

Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, followed Him on white horses. Now out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations. And He Himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS. (Revelation 19:11–16) The great Lord Jesus, the captain of the Lord's hosts, the King over all kings will descend to defend and protect His chosen people and put a once-and-for-all end to the evil of the Antichrist.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at most singles, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they often don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a lifetime, with them. Relationships and businesses are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world market by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the cost of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It is all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example: I tried to share what I know about learning with teachers, parents and psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, it is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Sometimes you couldn’t do much to change the fucked up circumstances, but even then everyone had to eat and drink. At least they were lucky enough they could afford the treats and the comfort—it hadn’t always been the case for Marisa and Ray. They’d never gone hungry—the pack wouldn’t have allowed it—but they’d grown up knowing money was short, learned not to ask for the newest toys or fancy clothes. They’d learned it and they’d taught it, and maybe that was the hardest part of all—not just to say no once or twice, but to explain to a child that there were certain things that others had that were out of your family’s reach.

how little you earn. It can be as much more as you can afford. Pay yourself first. Do not buy from the clothes-maker and the sandal-maker more than you can pay out of the rest and still have enough for food and charity and penance to the gods.

Whereas formerly it was considered a virtue to be thrifty and content with one’s lot, it is now considered to be the mark of a progressive nation that it is filled with hustling, go-getting citizens, intent on raising their standard of living. And this is not interpreted to mean merely that a decent sufficiency of food, clothes, and shelter is attainable by all citizens. It means much more and much less than this. It means that every citizen is encouraged to consider more, and more complicated, luxuries necessary to his well-being. The gluttonous consumption of manufactured goods had become, before the war, the prime civic virtue. And why? Because the machines can produce cheaply only if they produce in vast quantities; because unless the machines can produce cheaply nobody can afford to keep them running; and because, unless they are kept running, millions of citizens will be thrown out of employment, and the community will starve.

Katie Wells stood looking out her window down to the street below. She could still feel the effects of the hard-rock miner getting his money's worth in every way he could. Angry that he could not afford the younger, prettier girls of the Golden Nugget like Jolene and Candy, he had taken his frustrations out on her. The man had treated her in a way which he never would have if she hadn't been nearing forty, and slightly overweight. The moon was full tonight, and the street below was full of men looking to spend a few dollars for someone soft to hold. She stripped off what little was left of her clothes and saw herself in the mirror. Katie was still soft, perhaps almost pretty in the right light, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, but life had been unkind and it showed. She was bruised and sore, and she could feel the grime and dust from the mine all over her. The dirt would wash off, she knew. But the dirty way she felt inside would not.

Being thoroughly a man, one whose nature was rooted in competition, Zachary had experienced jealousy before. But nothing like this. Not this mixture of rage and alarm that shredded his insides. He was no idiot—he had seen the way Holly was looking at Ravenhill in the ballroom, and he had understood it all too well. They were cut from the same cloth, and they shared a past that he'd had no part of. There were bonds between them, memories, and even more, the comfort of knowing exactly what to expect from each other. All of a sudden Zachary hated Ravenhill with an intensity that approached fear. Ravenhill was everything he was not… everything he could never be. If only this were a more primitive time, the period of history when simple brute force overrode all else and a man could have what he wanted merely by staking his claim. That was how most of these damned bluebloods had originated, in fact. They were the watered-down, inbred descendents of warriors who had earned their status through battle and blood. Generations of privilege and ease had tamed them, softened and cultured them. Now these pampered aristocrats could afford to look down their noses at a man who probably resembled their revered ancestors more than they themselves did. That was his problem, Zachary realized. He had been born a few centuries too late. Instead of having to mince and prance his way into a society that was clearly too rarefied for him, he should have been able to dominate… fight… conquer. As Zachary had seen Holly leave the ballroom, her small hand tucked against Ravenhill's arm, it had required all his will to appear collected. He had nearly trembled with the urge to snatch Holly into his arms and carry her away like a barbarian. For a moment, the rational part of his brain had commanded him to let Holly go without a struggle. She had never been his to lose. Let her make the right decisions for herself, the comfortable decisions. Let her find the peace she deserved. The hell I will, he had thought savagely. He had followed the pair, intent as a prowling tiger, letting nothing stand in the way of what he wanted. And now he found Holly sitting here alone in the garden, looking dazed and dreamy, and he wanted to shake her until her hair cascaded loose and her teeth rattled.

All Hale Kate: Her story is as close to a real-life fairy tale as it gets. Born Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the quiet, sporty girl next door from the small town of Bucklebury - not quite Cinderella, but certainly a "commoner" by blue bloods' standards - managed to enchant the most eligible bachelor in the world, Prince William, while they were university students 15 years ago. It wasn't long before everyone else fell in love with her, too. We ached for her as she waited patiently for a proposal through 10 years of friendship and romance (and one devastating breakup!), cheered along with about 300 million other TV viewers when she finally became a princess bride in 2011, and watched in awe as she proceeded to graciously but firmly drag the stuffy royal family into the 21st century. And though she never met her mother-in-law, the late, beloved, Princess Diana, Kate is now filling the huge void left not just in her husband's life but in the world's heart when the People's Princess died. The Duchess of Cambridge shares Di's knack for charming world leaders and the general public alike, and the same fierce devotion to her family above all else. She's a busy, modern mom who wears affordable clothes, does her own shopping and cooking, struggles with feelings of insecurity and totes her kids along to work (even if the job happens to involve globe-trotting official state visits) - all while wearing her signature L.K. Bennett 4 inch heels. And one day in the not-too-distance future, this woman who grew up in a modest brick home in the countryside - and seems so very much like on of us- will take on another impossibly huge role: queen of England.

case of Adam, however, had no analogy with this, but was altogether different. For, having been beguiled by another under the pretext of immortality, he is immediately seized with terror, and hides himself; not as if he were able to escape from God; but, in a state of confusion at having transgressed His command, he feels unworthy to appear before and to hold converse with God. Now, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;” the sense of sin leads to repentance, and God bestows His compassion upon those who are penitent. For [Adam] showed his repentance by his conduct, through means of the girdle [which he used], covering himself with fig-leaves, while there were many other leaves, which would have irritated his body in a less degree. He, however, adopted a dress conformable to his disobedience, being awed by the fear of God; and resisting the erring, the lustful propensity of his flesh (since he had lost his natural disposition and child-like mind, and had come to the knowledge of evil things), he girded a bridle of continence upon himself and his wife, fearing God, and waiting for His coming, and indicating, as it were, some such thing [as follows]: Inasmuch as, he says, I have by disobedience lost that robe of sanctity which I had from the Spirit, I do now also acknowledge that I am deserving of a covering of this nature, which affords no gratification, but which gnaws and frets the body. And he would no doubt have retained this clothing for ever, thus humbling himself, if God, who is merciful, had not clothed them with tunics of skins instead of fig-leaves. For this purpose, too, He interrogates them, that the blame might light upon the woman; and again, He interrogates her, that she might convey the blame to the serpent. For she related what had occurred. “The serpent,” says she, “beguiled me, and I did eat.” But He put no question to the serpent; for He knew that he had been the prime mover in the guilty deed; but He pronounced the curse upon him in the first instance, that it might fall upon man with a mitigated rebuke. For God detested him who had led man astray, but by degrees, and little by little, He showed compassion to him who had been beguiled.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. Actually, that’s why this Chinese government sends its companies to other countries. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. This

Under the cover of darkness, that’s when duels were arranged, to conceal the proceedings that were frowned upon by law; and there was enough time for sobering-up if the challenge was prompted by intemperance brought on by too much drink. This duel though, was preplanned. “. . . that was how a dress sword came to be a part of a gentleman’s formal attire,” Francisco thus concluded his disquisition on duels that had proceeded at sinuous length when the three friends: Rodrigo, Miguel and himself, had gathered in his study to strategize just last Monday. Both parties had agreed to use pistols, not swords which was the weapon of choice up until the end of the last century. “If you can afford one, you can have a bespoke pistol made, Rodrigo,” said Francisco who, as was his wont, had been on a fact-finding mission about duels. These pistols came in cases complete with The Twenty-six Commandments, the code book that laid down the methodus pugnandi, the same book that Miguel had now folded and shoved into his pocket, its pages soft like cloth from much handling – and the damp from the river-mist. He and Francisco shuffled around in the shadows cast by the incipient pre-dawn sun, still unsure of their roles in this debauchery.

Harry didn’t think there was anything wrong with not being able to afford an owl. After all, he’d never had any money in his life until a month ago, and he told Ron so, all about having to wear Dudley’s old clothes and never getting proper birthday presents. This seemed to cheer Ron up.

A world that confuses luxury with success, has absolutely zero understanding of the human condition. That's why they idolize rich and filthy celebrities with private jets and rolls royce, as some sort of demigods. If this is your idea of success, then you guys are more disgustingly primitive than the wildlife in the amazon. At least, wild animals don't pretend to be civilized. Riches maketh filth, filth pursue riches. To live a life of luxury, or to dream of a life of luxury, doesn't make us ambitious, it only exposes the moron that we are. A species that has not realized simplicity as the way of life, will never in a million years have a society without disease and disparity. I won't mince my words, and tell you straight. Wanna be a decent human being? Stay away from luxury. Because luxury is a violation of human rights, human health, and above all, human character. It's funny really! Some people can't afford two wholesome meals a day, while others live with a private airport in their backyard. Some parents work their butt off to keep the clothes on their children's back, while others shower their kids with lamborghinis and teslas. If this doesn't open your eyes, perhaps you should try lobotomy. I'm sure you can find some unlicensed surgeon somewhere who'd do it for you if you offer them a trip to the bahamas, or better yet, a trip to space in your own spaceship.

The lot of the poor can easily be imagined, runs a textbook on Filipino economics. They are forced to eat unwholesome and inadequate food, wear ragged clothes, and live in unhealthful surroundings. When they get sick, they cannot afford medical care. The textbook continues: They are responsive to the subversive preachings of wild-eyed agitators who make extravagant promises of social amelioration.

He was twenty-eight years old with no family or partner to help make ends meet, and certainly no savings to allow him to pursue higher education in hope of finding a better career. When he wasn’t unclogging toilets and mopping up spills, he worked at a local tech-support call center. He delivered flyers. He bagged groceries and retrieved wayward carts and cleaned yet more spills at the local grocery store closest to his one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that shouldn’t cost as much to live in as it did. And it still wasn’t enough. Still Hero struggled to pay all his bills and afford the little luxuries of life like food and clothing and deeply necessary medication.

Uh-huh. I’m a very smart guy. I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whiskey, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up. I do all this for twenty-five bucks a day—and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers. And that makes me a son of a bitch. All right. I don’t care anything about that. I’ve been called that by people of all sizes and shapes, including your little sister. She called me worse than that for not getting into bed with her. I got five hundred dollars from your father, which I didn’t ask for, but he can afford to give it to me. I can get another thousand for finding Mr. Rusty Regan, if I could find him. Now you offer me fifteen grand. That makes me a big shot. With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes. I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case. That’s fine. What are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman, like that lush that passed out in his car the other night?

I was taught to prioritize what's "important"; food, water, children (Being the eldest among our siblings, I was taught to watch out for the younger ones). I was taught that the important stuff wasn't shiny; it involved logistics, practicals, survival. Only the necessary stuff to get by. Style, beauty, self-expression, affairs, superficiality — these are luxuries in my world. I could barely afford to eat lunch, much less buy clothes or get my hair styled in a salon. My family couldn't afford cable TV so I never watched MTV to learn the latest trends. So when I started high school, I had no regard for appearances. This is how I learned, the hard way, that maturity has no place with teenagers who could afford to have fun.

Horrible — well, not all of them. My aunt and uncle and cousin are, though. Wish I’d had three wizard brothers.” “Five,” said Ron. For some reason, he was looking gloomy. “I’m the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I’ve got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left — Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy’s a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good marks and everyone thinks they’re really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it’s no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I’ve got Bill’s old robes, Charlie’s old wand, and Percy’s old rat.” Ron reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fat gray rat, which was asleep. “His name’s Scabbers and he’s useless, he hardly ever wakes up. Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn’t aff — I mean, I got Scabbers instead.” Ron’s ears went pink. He seemed to think he’d said too much, because he went back to staring out of the window. Harry didn’t think there was anything wrong with not being able to afford an owl. After all, he’d never had any money in his life until a month ago, and he told Ron so, all about having to wear Dudley’s old clothes and never getting proper birthday presents. This seemed to cheer Ron up.

One price was more predictable: As British industry became increasingly efficient at spinning cotton into yarn and weaving yarn into cloth, the price of cloth dropped dramatically decade after decade. The luxury of an occasional change of clothing became an affordable necessity for millions across the globe—industrial efficiency had turned desires into fundamental needs.

Remarkably, a friend of James Watt at the University of Glasgow best understood how this phenomenon of labor savings would unfold. Making a wide set of observations and predictions about specialized industrial processes—in which each laborer focused on a particular task rather than creating the whole as craftsmen and artisans did—Adam Smith advanced the idea of “division of labor” as a central concept in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, the treatise that defined the contours of market capitalism. As people specialized and the work needed for a given task decreased, the overall need for human labor would not fall as was feared. Instead, standards of living would increase as more people could afford more, widening the market for all sorts of new goods, which would create new forms of work. To Smith, this endless discovery of efficiency gains was the catalyst for all economic growth. The ability for humanity to collectively rise above a day’s work for a day’s sustenance, by definition, required the economy to get more out of mankind’s collective labor. At the same time, Smith argued that these newly discovered efficiencies that caused men to lose their livelihoods would seem cruel, but were inevitable as new ways replaced old. The interdependencies caused by industrialization, where one man’s effort was tied to that of another and then another, were an abstraction. As people left the self-sufficient village farm, where shelter, food, and clothing were simple domestic responsibilities, the idea of losing one’s place in the specialized economy was a danger that few had been exposed to.

Just because you have money and you can afford expensive clothes doesn’t mean that you have taste.

Of all living things, Man is the only one who does worry. From the minute he born he have to start hustling for food, clothes and shelter, and he hardly live a few years before he have to begin to worry about death. And in them few years, think of all the contention and bafflement and the fights and arguments and struggles and hardships and sorrows. So really speaking, if it have fellars who seem to be breezing through life without a care, you have to say good luck to them. If a fellar could afford to laugh skiff-skiff at something what making you cry, how could you blame him? You wish you could of laugh yourself! It have great philosophers who wish they was like that, who wish they haven't to bother with the international situation, what happening behind the Iron Curtain, what going on in the Middle East, if it going to be a labouring year or a conservative year in the old Brit'n.

Of all living things, Man is the only one who does worry. From the minute he born he have to start hustling for food, clothes and shelter, and he hardly live a few years before he have to begin to worry about death. And in them few years, think of all the contention and bafflement and the fights and arguments and struggles and hardships and sorrows. So really speaking, if it have fellars who seem to be breezing through life without a care, you have to say good luck to them. If a fellar could afford to laugh skiff-skiff at something what making you cry, how could you blame him? You wish you could of laugh yourself! It have great philosophers who wish they was like that, who wish they haven't to bother with the international situation, what happening behind the Iron Curtain, what going on in the Middle East, if it going to be a labouring year or a conservative year in the old Brit'n.

Sewing is an enjoyable hobby that allows you to be creative and make a variety of items for yourself and others. At Clothingus.com, we offer a range of resources to help you learn how to sew, including easy projects and information about different sewing tools and their uses. Here are some interesting facts about sewing and related materials that may inspire you to try this useful craft: Cotton fabric can last for up to 100 years with proper care. In fact, cotton fabric has been found in many archaeological sites, indicating its longevity. Women's buttons are typically sewn onto the left side of a garment due to historical reasons. In the past, buttons were expensive, and only wealthy women with domestic help could afford them. To make it easier for the help to button up the garments, they were placed on the left side. Zippers were invented in 1893 and were initially used only on shoes and boots to make them easier to put on. Over time, they gained popularity and were used on other garments as well. The term "calico" refers to a type of cotton print that originated in the city of Calcutta, India. These hand-woven printed fabrics were made in the late 18th century and were named after the city. Buttons on sleeves were introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte. He wanted to prevent his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves, so he ordered buttons to be sewn onto the ends of the sleeves. Sewing is believed to be one of the first skills that Homo sapiens learned. Archaeologists have found evidence of people sewing together fur, hide, skin, and bark for clothing dating back to 25,000 years ago. Early sewing needles were made of bone and ivory, with metal needles being developed later in human history. By the 20th century, more than 4000 different types of sewing machines had been invented. However, only those that made sewing simple, fun, and easy survived over time. If you're interested in learning more about sewing, visit Clothingus.com for lessons and projects that can help you build a solid foundation in this skill. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, we have something for you. Visit Clothingus.com now.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

I also bought an evening dress suit from a secondhand clothing store in Charing Cross Road. It was double-breasted and in a very heavy, uncomfortable material, and I looked, frankly, stupid in it, but it was the only one I could afford. Miss Leigh announced to us one day that Gone with the Wind was going to be rereleased theatrically, and she requested the pleasure of our entire company at the premiere, which would be my first. And so, also for the first time, I had to wear that tux in public. I had by this time bid farewell to my friends and moved out of the boardinghouse, to slightly nicer digs that were walking distance from the London Coliseum in St. Martin’s Lane. This meant that I would not need to get out of a taxi and walk the red carpet—I knew that I looked idiotic in my tuxedo and wanted to keep a low profile. Inside, there was a champagne reception before the film in the upstairs bar, and my castmates had a field day making fun of me and my shit suit. Evidently, Miss Leigh caught sight of this scene and took pity on me. For all of a sudden, her boyfriend, John Merivale, was at my side, whispering into my ear that he was going to be sitting on one side of Vivien at the screening and that she had requested that I sit on her other side. I was already besotted with her, and this act of kindness only intensified my feelings. The capper was that, once I was seated beside her, I addressed her as “Miss Leigh” and she took my hand in hers. “Patrick,” she said, “you are to call me Vivien.” My erstwhile Irish roommate was right: The memorable experiences were already piling up. One more happened that evening. The film had been running for about an hour when Vivien—I still couldn’t quite believe I got to call her that—turned to me and again took my hand. I could see that she was crying. “I am so sorry, Patrick, but I am going to have to leave,” she said. “So many of these dear people I worked with are now dead, and it is making me so sad. I hope you enjoy the rest of it.” And off she went into the night.

Frequently, we don’t even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Billions of us can hardly afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history gives no discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids – you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is very unfair; but who said history was fair?