Agency Costs Quotes

The consolidation of power at the federal level in the guise of public safety is a national trend and should be guarded against at all costs. This erosion of rights, however incremental, is the slow death of freedom. We have reached a point where the power of the federal government is such that they can essentially target anyone of their choosing. Recent allegations that government agencies may have targeted political opponents should alarm all Americans, regardless of party affiliation. Revisionist views of the Constitution by opportunistic politicians and unelected judges with agendas that reinterpret the Bill of Rights to take power away from the people and consolidate it at the federal level threaten the core principles of the Republic. As a free people, keeping federal power in check is something that should be of concern to us all. The fundamental value of freedom is what sets us apart from the rest of the world. We are citizens, not subjects, and we must stay ever vigilant that we remain so.

This fantasy that it is possible to fish sustainably, legally, and using workers with contracts, making a living wage, and still deliver a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of mi,es away. Prices that low and efficiencies that tight come with hidden costs, and it is the manning agencies that help in the hiding.

No one 'just adopts'.

These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with.

In this connection a few comments upon the crack female control agency known as the "Aunts" is perhaps in order. Judd—according to the Limpkin material—was of the opinion from the outset that the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves.

From this day forward, let no human make war upon any other human. Let no Terran agency conspire against this new beginning. And let no man consort with alien powers. And to all the enemies of humanity, seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through, no matter the cost!

Instead, the mission of the agency is moral, and its success must be judged in significant part on moral grounds, not cost-benefit grounds. It is the moral mission of the EPA that offends conservatives. The same is true of the moral missions of the arts and humanities endowments. One

The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employer’s products, the higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a competitive market—monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies—have greater leeway.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies.

Ex-offenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have been taken away in a democracy.

As for the Zamorians’ mentality, they can be quite ruthless, they love to brawl, they’re extremely dominant, super possessive, and always need to win at all costs.” “All I’m hearing is ‘sexy, sexy, sexy, super sexy, and I can cure him of that.

Regulation-writers find it much easier to address safety than health hazards. The former are technically easier to find, describe, assess, and control than the latter. A worker falls from a platform. The cause is clear - no railing. The effect is clear - a broken leg. The cost is easily calculated - so many days in the hospital, so many days of lost wages, so much to build a railing. The directive is easy to write: "Install railings on platforms." But if a worker develops cancer fifteen years after starting work in a chemical plant, the cause of the cancer will be uncertain and controversial. The cost of the disease will be hard to calculate. The solution will be hard to specify:

Because by definition they lack any such sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another. The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one's own interest as far as possible. Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint. Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so. The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it. It is for this reason that none of our basic problems is ever solved. Indeed, it is for this reason that our basic problems are getting worse. The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures -- just as the myth of imminent cure (by some 'breakthrough' of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying as to foreclose any possibility of an interest in prevention. The problems thus become the stock in trade of specialists. The so-called professions survive by endlessly "processing" and talking about problems that they have neither the will nor the competence to solve. The doctor who is interested in disease but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. The both have the comfort of 'job security,' but at the cost of ultimate futility. ... This has become, to some extent at least, an argument against institutional solutions. Such solutions necessarily fail to solve the problems to which they are addressed because, by definition, the cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way -- a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

It should come as absolutely no surprise that research has ignored women for so long because the establishment: the journal publishers, the reviewers and the funding agencies has rewarded it. Although the things are changing for the better in the US federal agencies will no longer fund clinical trials involving humans that do not include women... there is still a long way to go [..] Thoughtful, carefully done research on females still takes longer and costs more and is often times harder to interpret than research conducted only on males. So when people's careers depend on their publication rate rather than the need for answers to the questions they are asking, women and the issues they care about most - loose.

We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual. Lusty libertines. Rakes, rogues, and roués. Tomcats and sex kittens. Horndogs. Bitches in heat.1 True, some of us manage to rise above this aspect of our nature (or to sink below it). But these preconscious impulses remain our biological baseline, our reference point, the zero in our own personal number system. Our evolved tendencies are considered “normal” by the body each of us occupies. Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Acknowledged or not, these evolved yearnings persist and clamor for our attention. And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens.

One person can make a difference. A huge difference. Consider what a solitary individual may accomplish: In 1645 one vote gave Oliver Cromwell control of England. In 1649 one vote cost Charles I of England his life, causing him to be executed. In 1776 one vote gave America the English language instead of the German language. In 1839 one vote elected Mark Morgan governor of Massachusetts. In 1845 one vote brought Texas into the Union. In 1868 one vote saved President Johnson from impeachment. In 1875 one vote changed France from a monarchy to a republic. In 1876 one vote gave Rutherford B. Hayes the United States presidency. In 1923 one vote gave Adolf Hitler control of the Nazi party. In 1941 one vote saved the Selective Service Agency just

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely on a married mother as the breadwinner. In every state in the United States, there are more single than married Black mothers. In every state in the United States there are more married white mothers than single ones. In twenty-four states, the cost of childcare exceeds the cost of rent, and in many states the cost of childcare exceeds the 10 percent income-affordability threshold established by federal agencies.

The reality of government disruption of the free market cannot be overemphasized, for it is at the heart of our present and future crisis. We have savings institutions that are controlled by government at every step of the way. Federal agencies provide protection against losses and lay down rigid guidelines for capitalization levels, number of branches, territories covered, management policies, services rendered, and interest rates charged. The additional cost to S&Ls of compliance with this regulation has been estimated by the American Bankers Association at about $11 billion per year, which represents a whopping 60% of all their profits.

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of “formal” financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with “informal” financial intermediation: every investor spends time—in some cases a lot of time—managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity.

After the 2013 revelations, the US government would try to disparage me by referring to me as “only a contractor” or “a former Dell employee,” with the implication that I didn’t enjoy the same kinds of clearance and access as a blue-badged agency staffer. Once that discrediting characterization was established, the government proceeded to accuse me of “job-hopping,” hinting that I was some sort of disgruntled worker who didn’t get along with superiors or an exceptionally ambitious employee dead-set on getting ahead at all costs. The truth is that these were both lies of convenience. The IC knows better than anyone that changing jobs is part of the career track of every contractor: it’s a mobility situation that the agencies themselves created, and profit from.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

Treating the cause of high prices and interest rates in low-income neighborhoods as the product of personal greed or exploitation, and attempting to remedy the problem through the imposition of price controls and interest rate caps. , it only ensures that people living in low-income neighborhoods have even less chance of accessing these services in the future. Just as rent control reduces the supply of housing, price and interest rate control can reduce the number of stores, pawn shops, local finance companies, and check-paying agencies willing to operate in costly neighborhoods. higher, when those costs cannot be recovered through legally permitted prices and interest rates. The only alternative for many residents of low-income neighborhoods may end up being to exit the legal market of financial institutions and ask for money from usurious lenders, who set even higher interest rates and have their own collection methods.

There was a vague feeling within the agency (though with several notable exceptions) that direct ascent would eventually be the answer, but no one had worked out the tradeoffs in much detail. Subsequently, as Apollo planning progressed, the question of how to fly to the moon and back loomed ever larger. In the end, the choice of mode was perhaps the single greatest technical decision of the entire Apollo program. The selection was inextricably linked to launch vehicles, spacecraft, facilities, cost, development schedules, and the future of America’s posture in space. Ultimately, the mode question shaped the whole of Apollo. Many possible methods were carefully considered, and a Pandora’s box of problems was opened. At the time, however, technical thinking had not matured to that degree. The United States was just on the threshold of manned space flight, and orbital flights around the earth were in themselves mind-boggling. A program to land men on the moon, 400,000 kilometers away, and bring them safely home was nearly too stupendous for serious contemplation.

A pre-mortem typically starts with the leader asking everyone in the team to imagine that the project has gone horribly wrong and to write down the reasons why on a piece of paper. He or she then asks everyone to read a single reason from the list, starting with the project manager, before going around the table again. Klein cites examples where issues have surfaced that would otherwise have remained buried. ‘In a session held at one Fortune 50-size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired,’ he writes. ‘Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.’15 The purpose of the pre-mortem is not to kill off plans, but to strengthen them. It is also very easy to conduct. ‘My guess is that, in general, doing a pre-mortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned,’ Kahneman has said. ‘But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial. So the pre-mortem is a low-cost, high-pay-off kind of thing.

Whilst the earlier forms of oppression confronted by Gandhi and King were in decline, when King turned his attention to economic injustice, it was another matter. He had come to realize that the fundamental, underlying injustice in American life was the exclusion of the poor of all races and cultures from the opportunity to attain even the bare minimum of the necessities of life. Martin King, then, entered a new and different arena. He was involved no longer in fighting regional, social injustice but rather in attempting to confront the core issue of economic injustice in American society, which went hand in hand with waging a costly war and the growth of militarism. This new struggle brought him into direct conflict with the federal government and its numerous agency surrogates whose mission it was to serve and protect American corporate interests at home and abroad. The new post-war corporate colonialism was very far from being a spent force in 1968. If his opposition to the war was unacceptable to the corporate beneficiaries, the Poor People's Campaign was intolerable. Not only could it turn into a revolution which could only be stopped, if at all, by the massacre of Americans but, in the very least, millions of Americans would unavoidably be required to see for themselves the previously unseen massive number of their impoverished fellow citizens.

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans66 when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.67 The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.68 America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Typical of the form is an item from the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog of June 24, 2013: The Social Security Administration’s inspector general on Monday said the agency improperly paid $31 million in benefits to 1,546 Americans believed to be deceased. And potentially making matters worse for the agency, the inspector general said the Social Security Administration had death certificate information on each person filed in the government database, suggesting it should have known the Americans had died and halted payments. Why do we allow this kind of thing to persist? The answer is simple—eliminating waste has a cost, just as getting to the airport early has a cost. Enforcement and vigilance are worthy goals, but eliminating all the waste, just like eliminating even the slightest chance of missing a plane, carries a cost that outweighs the benefit. As blogger (and former mathlete) Nicholas Beaudrot observed, that $31 million represents .004% of the benefits disbursed annually by the SSA. In other words, the agency is already extremely good at knowing who’s alive and who’s no more. Getting even better at that distinction, in order to eliminate those last few mistakes, might be expensive. If we’re going to count utils, we shouldn’t be asking, “Why are we wasting the taxpayer’s money?,” but “What’s the right amount of the taxpayer’s money to be wasting?” To paraphrase Stigler: if your government isn’t wasteful, you’re spending too much time fighting government waste.

Science has proven that sin has the power to change us for the worse. In a healthy brain, rational thought can override impulsive behavior. Not so in a brain affected by addiction. This is how Satan steals our ability to choose wisely. Addiction costs us the ability to exercise our agency.

All of this coordinating with sites all over the world might sound time-consuming, and it can be, but no one would ever suggest changing it. With so many space agencies cooperating, it’s important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plans can change quickly, and a misunderstanding could be costly, or deadly. We do this whole circuit of control centers both morning and evening, five days a week.

For the first time in the US Forest Service's history, more than half the agency's annual appropriated budget was devoted to wildfires in 2015, up from 16 percent in 1995. Nowadays, the US Forest SErvice's annual firefighting budget routinely runs our of money before the fire season ends. With this trend of increasing costs for fighting wildfires expected to continue, two-thirds of the agency's budget will go for this kind of work by 2025.

Smári has scrutinized current National Security Agency (NSA) programs revealed by Edward Snowden and the overall security budget of the U.S. government, and calculated it currently costs 13 cents a day to spy on every internet user in the world. He hopes that default encryption services like his will push that closer to $10,000. It’s not to stop people being spied on—he agrees that’s sometimes necessary—but rather to drastically limit it. At this inflated cost he estimates the U.S. government would only be able to afford to keep tabs on around 30,000 people. “If we can’t trust the government to do only those things that are necessary and proportionate—and we can’t—then economics can force them to.

An involved officer in any intelligence and investigation agency almost becomes a member of the organised mafia. He can afford to get out only at the cost of inviting a few fatal bullets or an accidental hit by a running truck at a lonely intersection.

Before the Obama administration’s reform, most student lending was done through the ill-advised Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, under which the federal government backed an intricate private system of dispersed lending agencies at a totally unnecessary cost to taxpayers. There was no sense in the government using its credit rating to support private lenders while the fat cats profited off students.

It would be one hell of a coincidence if private and public universities responded to entirely different sets of cost pressures in the same way over the course of three decades. The most obvious explanation is that nonprofit higher education has become a single industry with premium and generic brands. If you don’t believe me, then at least believe the financial services agency Moody’s, whose 2013 report describes the distinction in the clear and unashamed language of unaccountable finance professionals: “Public universities are now as market driven as private universities, but remain a lower cost option with stronger pricing power.” 19

What do citizens expect of government agencies entrusted with crime control, risk control, or other harm reduction duties? The public does not expect that governments will be able to prevent all crimes or contain all harms. But they do expect government agencies to provide the best protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by being:           Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats early, pick up on precursors and warning signs, use their imaginations to work out what could happen, use their intelligence systems to discover what others are planning, and do all this before much harm is done.           Nimble, flexible enough to organize themselves quickly and appropriately around each emerging crime pattern rather than being locked into routines and processes designed for traditional issues.           Skillful, masters of the entire intervention tool kit, experienced (as craftsmen) in picking the best tools for each task, and adept at inventing new approaches when existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 Real success in crime control—spotting emerging crime problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm—would not produce substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures, because genuine and substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown out of control. Neither would best practices produce enormous numbers of arrests, coercive interventions, or any other specific activity, because skill demands economy in the use of force and financial resources and rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather than extensive and costly campaigns. Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics that still seem to wield the most influence in many departments—crime reduction and enforcement productivity—would utterly fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control. Further, we must take seriously the fact that other important duties of the police will never be captured through crime statistics or in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy document:

If you add up all the Christian missionaries from all denominations and missions agencies in the 10/40 window, there are about 40,000 “missionaries.” The number of Americans working in secular employment in the 10/40 window is 2 million.6 Assuming that the faith of Americans working overseas resembles that of Americans living at home, about 35 percent of them identify as born-again with some semblance of engagement in the faith, such as church attendance. If even one-third of that number were effective disciple-makers, that would increase the number of Christian evangelists on the front lines from 40,000 to 240,000, all without costing mission agencies another dime.

The cultural divides within the advertising industry became wider when web pages became part of the marketing mix, beginning in 1995. Early web pages were like printed catalogs, and traditional advertising agencies knew how to design catalogs – they were just pictures and words in a different medium, right? The rub was that web pages seemed to clients and agencies more like the domain of software folk, like computer programmers, rather than the domain of traditional copywriters and art directors. An automotive company that wanted to put up web pages to help consumers choose car models and features was more likely to go to a group of programmers than to a traditional agency. The web production costs were exceptionally high, too – the hours spent by web designers and programmers far outstripped the creative hours spent on catalogs. Wasn’t the business of web design (and later, web advertising) a separate business? Traditional

Accountability for agency operations is fragmented. Each office in a network is a separate profit center. Each department in an office self-defines its missions. Creative heads focus on creativity; finance directors focus on headcounts, overhead and budgeted/ actual costs and profits; client heads manage the service that they provide to their ‘disorganized’ clients and keep them coming back for more. (Despite this there seem to be very few happy clients.) Managing

Who is responsible for an agency’s operational response to growing workloads and declining fees? In today’s agency culture, it’s everyone… and no one. The agency management culture is fragmented and divided. Everyone does his/her own thing. An integrated counter-attack is hard to organize, and in practice, it simply does not happen. At the end of the year, the finance director has the ultimate responsibility to deliver the agency’s profit margin, and this is often done through cost reductions – a blunt instrument, indeed, but the laissez-faire culture does not allow for much fine-tuning during the year. The agency management culture is a barrier to change. It

Procurement sets fees based on a negotiated agreement about agency headcounts and costs, and (separately) marketing generates workloads for the agencies. Agencies, who measure client health through profitability measures alone, have no rigorous way to factor in client workloads. TABLE

The scale of U.S. military operations is remarkable. The U.S. Department of Defense has (as of a 2014 inventory) 4,855 military facilities, of which 4,154 are in the United States; 114 are in overseas U.S. territories; and 587 are in forty-two foreign countries and foreign territories in all regions of the world.2 Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of U.S. national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans’ benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.

In 2013, one of the Cardinals’ rival scouting departments commissioned a study that examined draft outcomes more deeply still. The study, which extended back to 1990, found that if a club’s draft produces nine players who appear in the majors for even a single game, it ranks in the 95th percentile. The 95th percentile for number of everyday players—defined as those who go on to accumulate 1,500 big league plate appearances or batters faced—is four. The 95th percentile for number of firmly above-average players—that is, those who produce a cumulative Wins Above Replacement above 6.0 in their six cost-controlled, pre–free agency seasons—is three.

REACTANCE When pushed, people push back. So rather than telling people what to do, or trying to persuade, catalysts allow for agency and encourage people to convince themselves. ENDOWMENT People are attached to the status quo. To ease endowment, catalysts surface the costs of inaction and help people realize that doing nothing isn’t as costless as it seems. DISTANCE Too far from their backyard, people tend to disregard. Perspectives that are too far away fall in the region of rejection and get discounted, so catalysts shrink distance, asking for less and switching the field. UNCERTAINTY Seeds of doubt slow the winds of change. To get people to un-pause, catalysts alleviate uncertainty. Easier to try means more likely to buy.

Perhaps it was foolhardy to suppose that in real life we could undo what had been done, cancel our knowledge of evil, uninvent our weapons, stow away what remained in some safe hiding place. With the devastation of World War II still grimly visible, its stench hardly gone from the air, the community of nations started to fragment, its members splitting into factions, resorting to threats and, finally, to violence and to war. The certainty of peace had proved little more than a fragile dream. “And so the great democracies triumphed,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote later. “And so were able to resume the follies that had nearly cost them their life.” Prophetic as he was, Churchill did not foresee the awesome extremes to which these follies would extend: diplomacy negotiated within a balance of nuclear terror; resistance tactics translated into guidelines for fanatics and terrorists; intelligence agencies evolving technologically to a level where they could threaten the very principles of the nations they were created to defend. One way or another, such dragon’s teeth were sown in the secret activities of World War II. Questions of utmost gravity emerged: Were crucial events being maneuvered by elite secret power groups? Were self-aggrandizing careerists cynically displacing principle among those entrusted with the stewardship of intelligence? What had happened over three decades to an altruistic force that had played so pivotal a role in saving a free world from annihilation or slavery? In the name of sanity, the past now had to be seen clearly. The time had come to open the books.

Indeed, it was so easy to make anybody happy. All that was required was a kind word or two—a kind word that cost nothing, and yet could have such a profound effect.

partners to make progress toward clearly defined goals. The work, however, should begin with identifying challenges and understanding them on their own terms and from the perspective of “the other.” I asked our team not only to map the interests of rivals, adversaries, and enemies, but also to consider the emotions, aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain them. The options we developed, if approved, would become integrated strategies. I insisted that these strategies must identify not only goals, but also our assumptions—especially assumptions concerning the degree of agency and control that we and our partners could expect in order to make progress toward those goals. The strategies needed to be logical with regard to the means employed and the desired ends. We would also work hard to describe what was at stake and to explain why accomplishing those ends was worth the risks and potential cost in treasure and, especially, blood. I then laid out what I saw, from my more than three decades in the military and from studying national security as a historian, as the four categories of challenges to national and international security. These would be our priorities as we developed integrated strategies for the president.

The consolidation of power at the federal level in the guise of public safety is a national trend and should be guarded against at all costs. This erosion of rights, however incremental, is the slow death of freedom. We have reached a point where the power of the federal government is such that they can essentially target anyone of their choosing. Recent allegations that government agencies may have targeted political opponents should alarm all Americans, regardless of party affiliation. Revisionist views of the Constitution by opportunistic politicians and unelected judges with agendas that reinterpret the Bill of Rights to take power away from the people and consolidate it at the federal level threaten the core principles of the Republic. As a free people, keeping federal power in check is something that should be of concern to us all. The fundamental value of freedom is what sets us apart from the rest of the world. We are citizens, not subjects, and we must stay ever vigilant that we remain so. Jack Carr August 6, 2017

have many such memories, but I’ll never forget a meeting with a young blond Senate banking committee staffer in 2003. After hearing our research presentation, she said with a sad little shake of her head, “the problem was we put these people into houses when we shouldn’t have.” I marveled at the inversion of agency in her phrasing. Who was the “we”? Not the hardworking strivers who had finally gotten their fingers around the American Dream despite every barrier and obstacle. No, the “we” was well-intentioned people in government—undoubtedly white, in her mental map. Never mind that most of the predatory loans we were talking about weren’t intended to help people purchase homes, but rather, were draining equity from existing homeowners. From 1998 to 2006, the majority of subprime mortgages created were for refinancing, and less than 10 percent were for first-time homebuyers. It was still a typical refrain, redolent of long-standing stereotypes about people of color being unable to handle money—a tidy justification for denying them ways to obtain it.

In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding. We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.

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What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

Q: What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)

This is also a book about control. The consolidation of power at the federal level in the guise of public safety is a national trend and should be guarded against at all costs. This erosion of rights, however incremental, is the slow death of freedom. We have reached a point where the power of the federal government is such that they can essentially target anyone of their choosing. Recent allegations that government agencies may have targeted political opponents should alarm all Americans, regardless of party affiliation. Revisionist views of the Constitution by opportunistic politicians and unelected judges with agendas that reinterpret the Bill of Rights to take power away from the people and consolidate it at the federal level threaten the core principles of the Republic. As a free people, keeping federal power in check is something that should be of concern to us all. The fundamental value of freedom is what sets us apart from the rest of the world. We are citizens, not subjects, and we must stay ever vigilant that we remain so. Jack Carr August 6, 2017 Park City, Utah

My Choice Health Insurance is a black-owned health insurance agency in New Orleans that specializes in helping the underserved black community in New Orleans to obtain affordable health insurance through the ACA Marketplace (Affordable Care Act) also known as Obamacare. We are dedicated to empower individual and black families to make sure they are educated, supported, and provided all the resources to help them take advantage of free or low-cost Obamacare health insurance plans.

Another example would be an ad agency that has a graphic designer who is not able to produce the quality of creative work needed, so, rather than address the problem directly, that designer is assigned menial jobs that are essentially busywork. The agency then hires a second graphic designer to do the more creative work despite the cost and the fact that the agency doesn’t have enough work to justify two designers.

In the current system, to manage the laborious process of cross-firm reconciliation, middlemen ledger-keepers have been created—clearinghouses, settlement agencies, and correspondent banks, custodial banks, and others. Those intermediaries solve some of the trust problems but they also add cost, time, and risk. In the United States, the final settlement of a trade takes two days for U.S. Treasury bonds and up to thirty days for instruments such as syndicated loans. Not only do massive errors and omissions still occur, but the time lag paralyzes literally trillions of dollars of potentially useful capital, which must wait in escrow accounts or collateral agreements until all parties have cleared their books and the trade is settled. A more efficient, real-time system would unlock those funds, sending a wall of money into the world’s markets—yes, to make bankers richer, but also to provide more credit to businesses and households. In theory, R3’s distributed ledger could achieve all that. It could unleash a tidal wave of money.

When analyzing the cost of U.S. health care, it’s important to remember that spending is not spread evenly among all patients. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2009, 21.8% of health care spending came from just 1% of patients. That’s roughly three million people in the U.S. who each spent about $90,000 in a year on health-related expenses. Further, the AHRQ states, “[T]he top decile of spenders were more likely to be in fair or poor health, elderly, female, non-Hispanic whites and those with public-only coverage. Those who remained in the bottom half of spenders were more likely to be in excellent health, children and young adults, men, Hispanics, and the uninsured.”44 The fact that so many resources go to so few patients led to the term “super-utilizers.” Increasingly, policy efforts focus on how to reduce costs among this group.

Securiport Affaire Mali is revolutionizing border security in Africa. This branch of the global company partners with government border agencies, providing cost-effective technology and training.

Even in his short service time he’d noticed how brass-heavy the agency was becoming, how expensive civilian consultants were brought in to advise on everything, how essential equipment projects had fallen behind schedule and grown massive cost overruns.

When body positivity is forced or feels controlling, it can thwart feelings of agency and autonomy and therefore backfire…. Placing emphasis on positivity while ignoring negative feelings and experiences exerts a cost to authenticity and self-integration—or, the need to feel true to (and congruent with) oneself.[24]

British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.” This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing. In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money. The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune? They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists. In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement. The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family. The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time. Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.

for most political leaders the warnings of the experts counted for little when compared with the immediate advantages of monetary union. As soon as a country adopted the euro, its public debt received the highest rating by the international agencies, and consequently its government could borrow at about the same interest rate as the most virtuous members of the bloc. This meant that countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Italy could borrow at rates well below the double-digit rates they had to pay before adopting the euro. In particular, the possibility of borrowing at low cost in the international financial markets is what made possible the Spanish real-estate boom. As a result of the euro-induced boom, wages and inflation grew much faster in Spain than in Germany or France. At the same time, the ECB, being mainly concerned with the level of inflation in the largest economies of the euro zone – Germany, France, and Italy – allowed the interest rate to remain low – too low for the conditions prevailing in Spain.

The Main Revenue Accounts and Their Origin Revenue Chart of Accounts Air sales, Domestic Air Sales, International Cost of Domestic Air Sales Cost of Intl Air Sales Tour Sales Cruise Sales Cost of Tour Sales

Cost of Cruise Sales Other Sales Cost of Other Sales (Refunds) (Refund Credits) Car Commissions Hotel Commissions Other Commissions Service Fees and Tuition Advertising Income Interest Income Air Sales and Cost of Air Sales

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

At one point during his second term, agents say Clinton managed to lose the plastic authenticator card with the codes he would need to verify his identity to launch nuclear weapons. “He has to keep those codes with him at all times, at all costs,” says a former agent. “With the codes, the White House Communications Agency can set up communications through the nuclear football and hit the satellites.” Retired general Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in his book Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior that in Clinton’s last year in office, the required codes for launching a nuclear strike were missing for months. “This is a big deal—a gargantuan deal—and we dodged a silver bullet,” Shelton wrote. As the Secret Service sees it, Hillary and Bill Clinton have a business relationship, not a marriage.

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

It’s largely because the Palestinian resistance has never prevented differences from existing within it—even at the cost of open confrontations—that it has been able to give the Israeli army a hard time. Here as elsewhere, political fragmentation is just as much the sign of an undeniable ethical vitality as it is the nightmare of the intelligence agencies charged with mapping, then annihilating, resistance

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

In order to leverage the power of cloud computing across the Federal Government’s IT portfolio, the Administration established a “Cloud First” policy in the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology published in December of 20102. Under this policy, Federal agencies are required to “default to cloud-based solutions whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists.

Three years after the United States ended the space shuttle program, the American space agency today announced the return of “human space flight to U.S. soil.” NASA has chosen two spaceships, the Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Dragon version 2, to bring American astronauts to the International Space Station. The program will cost $6.8 billion.

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According to the Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement maintains fifteen detention centers around the country and on any given day there are 35,000 people in custody. Last year ICE detained over 400,000 undocumented workers and deported about the same number, at a cost of over $20,000 per deportee. The entire detention system eats over $2 billion a year. It’s the largest immigrant detention system in the world. In addition to the fifteen ICE facilities, the Feds contract with hundreds of county jails, juvenile detention centers, and state prisons to house their detainees, at a cost of about 150 bucks a day per person, 350 for a family. Two-thirds of all facilities are run by private companies. The more bodies they have, the more money they make. Homeland Security, which ICE answers to, has a quota, one mandated by Congress. No other law enforcement agency operates on a quota system.” “And conditions are deplorable,” Zola said, as if she knew more than Mark. “Indeed they are. Since there is no independent oversight, the detainees are often subjected to abuse, including long-term solitary confinement and inadequate medical care and bad food. They are vulnerable to assault, even rape. Last year, 150 died in custody. Detainees are often housed with violent criminals. In many cases, legal representation is nonexistent. On paper, ICE has standards for the facilities, but these are not legally enforceable. There is almost no accountability for how the federal funds are spent. The truth is, no one is looking and no one cares, except for the detainees and their families. They are forgotten people.

Corruption is usually classified as a humanitarian aid problem, to be handled by donor agencies, not mainstreamed into overall foreign and defense policy. And while governments may support across-the-board efforts on a multilateral level, they almost never consider acute corruption as they shape their approach to specific countries. Human rights, religious freedom, protections for the LGBT community may enter the conversation, but corruption rarely does. Tools to raise the cost of kleptocratic practices exist—in abundance. It’s just a matter of finding the courage and finesse to use them. All the levers and incentives listed below can be further refined, and new ones imagined, in specific contexts. Particular corrupt officials or structures have unique vulnerabilities and desires; and timelines and windows of opportunity for effective action will be specific to individual cases and will suggest even more potential actions as they are examined. Many of the actions below can and should be routinized—folded into the everyday activities of relevant bureaucracies—so as to reduce the onus on leaders to sign their names to audacious and thus potentially career-threatening moves. But in other cases, a strategy may need to be carefully thought through and tailored to the specific conditions of a given country at a specific point in time.

The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators. The decimation of local species threatened the environment and the economics of Colombia, much of which depends on fishing. It was also destroying the ecology of coral reefs. This was when some colleagues of mine borrowed an idea from Frederick the Great; Ogilvy & Mather in Bogotá decided that the solution was to create a predator for the lionfish – humans. The simplest and most cost-effective way to rid Colombia’s waters of lionfish was to encourage people to eat them, which would encourage anglers to catch them. The agency recruited the top chefs in Colombia and encouraged them to create lionfish recipes for the best restaurants. As they explained, a lionfish is poisonous on the outside but delicious on the inside, so they created an advertising campaign titled ‘Terribly Delicious’. Working with the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, they generated a cultural shift by turning the invader into an everyday food. Lionfish soon appeared in supermarkets. Some 84 per cent of Colombians are Roman Catholic, so they asked the Catholic Church to recommend lionfish to their congregations on Fridays and during Lent. That additional element – recruiting the Catholic Church – was the true piece of alchemy. Today, indigenous fish species are recovering and the lionfish population is in decline.

Part B charges a monthly premium that in 2016 is $104.90 for most beneficiaries. However, about 5 percent of Part B subscribers earned enough money to push them into higher premium brackets. This set of surcharges is known as the income-related monthly adjustment amount, or IRMAA.16 Social Security makes this call and bases premiums on federal tax returns two years prior to the program year in question. So, the agency used 2014 returns to determine any 2016 Part B premium surcharges. For the detail-minded, the agency uses a measure of taxable income called “modified adjusted gross income.”17 Chapter 9 includes details of Part B premiums and surcharges.

The cost in time, personnel, and money for trying to identify the Golden State Killer prior to the use of IGG was significant,” Steve says. “Forty-three years, 15 agencies involved and 650 detectives/ agents; 200,000 man hours; $10 million spent; 300 people swabbed tor DNA; 5,000 people put under surveillance; 0 suspects.” By contrast, here are the numbers for our IGG investigation: 63 days; 6 people involved; $217 spent; 1 suspect.

Chinese companies have been smuggling pill presses illegally into the United States, mislabeling them as machine tools or other items or sending them disassembled to avoid detection.69 The destination is drug dealers and criminal gangs70 for the “mass production” of street drugs.71 Now Chinese companies send large quantities of pill presses to Mexico, too, including the metal cast dies to imprint pills with counterfeit numbers such as “M523” and “10/352,” which are the markings of real oxycodone pills. In other words, these Chinese companies are helping dealers produce counterfeit and illegal street drugs.72 In April 2020, the DOJ sent out an alert to law enforcement agencies with a blunt headline: “Chinese Pill Presses Are Key Components for Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl.” In the document, which was obtained by the author, the DOJ noted the “relatively moderate pricing” of $1,000 per pill press—essentially at cost. Why are Chinese companies not charging a huge markup to sell the pill presses to the drug cartels? The DOJ also noted that the “ambiguous export regulations in China allow traffickers to use vague manifest descriptions to describe pill press machines to avoid scrutiny from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.”73 Chinese pill press manufacturers are required by US law to alert the DEA when they ship pill presses to the United States so federal authorities can track those who might be illegally producing drugs.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015.

Going in a group is always enjoyable; it could be executives on a business trip, a family on a holiday, or a group of friends on an expedition. The very first thing to be considered while planning for such a trip is the airfare. The question is: “Is group booking in flights cost-efficient within India?” The answer is yes, but there is much more to it than merely getting the lowest price for a large group. Thus, cooperating with a professional travel agency like Seturtrip can help organize a great trip and get a good discount for a large number of people.

It is to cover this default risk that lenders add a default spread to the riskless rate when they lend money to firms; the greater the perceived risk of default, the greater the default spread and the cost of debt. To estimate this default spread, you can use a bond rating for the company, if one exists, from an established ratings agency such as S&P or Moody's. If there is no published bond rating, you can estimate a synthetic rating for the firm, based on its ratio of operating income to interest expenses (interest coverage ratio); higher interest coverage ratios will yield higher ratings and lower interest coverage ratios. Once you have a bond rating, you can estimate a default spread by looking at publicly traded bonds with that rating. In July 2023, S&P gave KHC a BBB rating, and the default spread for BBB-rated bonds at the time was 1.89%, which when added to the risk-free rate of 3.80% yields a pretax cost of debt of 5.69%. Incidentally, if KHC had not had a rating, we could have computed an interest coverage ratio for the firm: With this coverage ratio, we would have obtained a synthetic rating of A–, translating into a default spread of 1.54% and a pretax cost of debt of 5.34%, in July 2023.

But the country estate in Fairfax was not a government asylum. It was the headquarters of Station S, the nation’s first personality assessment center for covert operatives—a special project organized and funded by the Office of Strategic Services. A precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, the OSS owed its existence to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a bright-eyed, bull-nosed army major and lawyer whom friends described as an irrepressible patriot, a man determined to meet the U.S. government’s every espionage and counterespionage need no matter the inconvenience or cost.

Quoting page 74-75: The ability of the minority rights interest groups to win control of the new agencies of civil rights enforcement established in the 1960s followed a traditional pattern in the politics of regulation that students of public administration called “clientele capture.” The practice is as old as Jacksonian democracy, which set the American tradition wherein party patronage ruled the civil service and mission agencies were expected to cater to the needs of their organized constituencies: farmers, veterans, laborers, and business interests. By the 1960s, journalists referred to these arrangements as iron triangles.” They were three-way coalitions of mutual back-scratching, operating in Washington and in state and municipal governments throughout America. Three points of the triangle were organized interests which lobbied legislators to establish or expand programs beneficial to their members; legislative committees, which obliged the lobbyists by authorizing and funding programs for the mission agencies to manage; and government bureaucrats, who expanded their empire building service programs to benefit the interest groups. To complete the triangular cycle, interest groups supported the legislators. … because environmental and consumer protection regulation is cross-cutting and horizontal—covering pollution, for example, from all industrial sources, rather than single industry and vertical … it is a difficult target for capture. The new agencies of civil right regulation, however, were different in ways that made them highly vulnerable to capture. Most important, the cost-benefit structure of civil right regulation is the opposite of that found in environmental and consumer protection regulation. Benefits (jobs, promotions, admissions, contract set-asides) are narrowly concentrated among protected-class clienteles (racial and ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped). Costs, on the other hand, are widely distributed (government and corporate budgets).

In North America, it's estimated that $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly. The Forest Service has pegged the value of poached wood from its land at $100 million annually; in recent years, the agency estimates, 1 in 10 trees felled on public lands in the United States were harvested illegally. Associations of private timber companies gauge the value of wood stolen from them at around $350 million annually. In British Columbia, experts put the cost of timber theft from publicly managed forests at $20 million a year. Globally, the black market for timber is estimated at $157 billion, a figure that includes the market value of the wood, unpaid taxes, and lost revenues. Along with illegal fishing and the black-market animal trade, timber poaching contributes to a $1 trillion illegal wildlife-trade industry that is monitored by international crime organizations such as Interpol.

Russia was not waiting for rapprochement with the United States. They could see that Trump’s chaotic White House was creating numerous financial opportunities worldwide, and they were going to scoop them up. On December 5, 2018, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Russian state atomic energy company Rosatom went to Riyadh to meet with MBS. Its representative, Alexander Voronkov, said Russia would supply Generation 3+ VVER-1220 reactors for the kingdom, which he said were the most advanced ones Russia offered.26 It’s worth noting here that in 1994 Russia built the first nuclear reactor in Iran, also a VVER model. The reactors in Bushehr nuclear station were to be the same VVER-1220 as those Russia promised to Saudi Arabia.27 Even more interesting, Russian arms exporter Rosobornexport, a sanctioned arms company, sold S-300 air defense systems to Iran to protect Iran’s reactors, and one could imagine this could be part of the package to Saudi Arabia as well.28 The Russians were brilliantly offering regional parity and stability to both Iran and Saudi Arabia if the reactors were bought. It came with a tacit guarantee neither side could attack the other since they would have the same air defense system. On January 22, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) delivered a report on what Saudi Arabia needed to do to stay within international norms if it pursued a nuclear power program. Mikhail Chudakov, a former head of Russian nuclear programs and IAEA deputy director, delivered the report that gave the kingdom the green light to move forward.29 The following day, the kingdom received offers from five nations for construction of the project: the United States, Russia, France, South Korea, and China.30 The Saudis originally wanted sixteen reactors but have scaled that back to two as part of a larger effort to diversify its energy grid.31 The “tilt” seems to be toward the Russians, with the Russian IAEA official paving the way and the Rosatom folks working over the royal family. Like their arms sales, the Russians promised a fairly cheap but stable deal that comes with massive long-term costs. But it was Team Trump that started this game, trying to cheat, abuse ethics, and lie its way into potentially gaining billions of Arab sheikdom money under the guise of a major foreign policy initiative. In the end, they got played by Russia, who knew corruption at a master-class level. Trump was a piker. And Russia ate America’s lunch… again.

In the retail and service sectors, for example, agency and outsource staff are used to undermine settled wage rates and to externalize costs and risks.

And so, in labs that neither they nor we will ever seen, more millions of animals must endure internal bleeding, convulsions, seizures, paralysis, and slow death. A stroll through the laboratories of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company, of Emore or many other universities, of the EPA, Consumer Safety Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Defense, and a dozen other federal agencies would reveal similar scenes. It is easy to say, a priori, "It has to be done - it's the safety and progress." But we ourselves neither pay that price nor even look at the cost.

So what are the cognitive adaptations of which religion is hypothesized to be a by-product? The first is our hyperactive agency detection device, which leads us to infer that unseen forces are human agents (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011). This likely evolved as a protection or precaution adaptation (Boyer, 1992). We mistake a shadow for a burglar but never mistake a burglar for a shadow—an error management mechanism that helps us to avoid costly errors such as being robbed or mugged. This adaptation leads to misapplied anthropomorphism, as when we say “the sun is trying to come out” or “the clouds look angry.” Clouds and skies, of course, don’t have agency, yet we attribute human-like motivations to them as if they were agents with motives and intentions. Again, it is a small step to infer a god with human-like agency—a god that wants us to pray to him, worship him, sacrifice for him, and will punish us if we disobey him. Even children have what is called “promiscuous teleology,” the tendency to attribute purposes to people, groups, societies, cultures, mother earth, the universe, and god. A second class of cognitive mechanisms consists of theory of mind adaptations, by which we infer unseen beliefs, desires, and intentions in other people. Theory of mind adaptations are extremely useful in predicting the behavior of other people, their proper function. It is a small extrapolation to go from “there are people watching me who have a desire for my well-being” to “there is an all-seeing god watching me who has a desire for my well-being.” That is, we imbue these agents with motives, goals, and desires. Next comes the attachment system, which originally evolved in the context of mother–child bonds for protection and nurturance (Kirkpatrick, 2005). A 2-year-old reaching out to a mother to be soothed bears resemblance to a worshiper reaching out to a god: “we never lose the longing for a caretaker… [and] a god is always there for us” (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011, p. 45). Adaptations to form attachments, in short, get transferred to supernatural agents. Reciprocity adaptations are also activated, as when we make sacrifices for gods or make covenants with gods and expect that the gods will provide us with benefits in return.

And so, in labs that neither they nor we will ever seen, more millions of animals must endure internal bleeding, convulsions, seizures, paralysis, and slow death. A stroll through the laboratories of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company, of Emory or many other universities, of the EPA, Consumer Safety Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Defense, and a dozen other federal agencies would reveal similar scenes. It is easy to say, a priori, "It has to be done - it's the safety and progress." But we ourselves neither pay that price nor even look at the cost.

Let’s distinguish self-respect from self-esteem. Self-respect can be an element of a person’s sense of self-worth. But unlike self-esteem, the role it plays in constituting self-worth is not contingent on a person’s particular ambitions or self-confidence. Self-respect is a matter of recognizing oneself as a rational agent and a moral equal and valuing oneself accordingly. Self-respect is embodied and expressed in the way one conducts oneself. Moreover, persons with self-respect do not believe that they must earn just treatment—through, say, some display of virtue or personal achievement. They know that their capacity for rational and moral agency alone is sufficient to justify their claim not to be treated unjustly. When a healthy sense of self-respect is widespread in a society, this helps to sustain just practices and to deter injustice. And where there is systemic injustice, the self-respect of society’s members often moves them to reform their institutions. To maintain a healthy sense of self-respect under conditions of injustice, the oppressed may therefore fight back against their oppressors, demanding the justice they know they deserve, even when the available evidence suggests that justice is not on the horizon. Agents who take action to affirm their moral standing often take pride in such actions, particularly when these acts entail some personal risks or costs. Though self-respect has intrinsic value and great moral importance, it should not be regarded as a trump in moral deliberation. Moral agents need not and should not defend their self-respect at all cost. It is sometimes justifiable (or at least excusable) to sacrifice a bit of self-respect to protect others from harm, to avoid grave harm to oneself, or to achieve some worthy goal. However, the agent with a healthy sense of self-respect experiences them as sacrifices—as the painful loss of an intrinsically valuable good. The duty of self-respect, like the duty of justice, is thus a central element in the political ethics of the oppressed.

Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.

fight in America would cost him an average of one million dollars a day, at least, plus significant operating expenses from al-Matari’s cell, but if the end result meant America came to Iraq with boots on the ground, pushed back the Iranian hordes encroaching toward the south, ended pro-Iranian Alawite rule in Syria, and brought the price of oil back up to a level that would protect Saudi Arabian leadership’s domestic security . . . well, then, Sami bin Rashid would have done his job, and the King would reward him for life. A moment later INFORMER confirmed he received the money, and he told his customer to watch his mailbox in the dark web portal on his computer, and to wait for the files to come through. True to his word, INFORMER’s files began popping up, one by one. While bin Rashid clicked on the attachments, a smile grew inside his trim gray beard. First, the name, the address, and a photograph of a woman. A map of the area around where the woman lived. A CV of her work with the Defense Intelligence Agency, including foreign and domestic postings that would have her involved in the American campaign in the Middle East. Real-time intel about her daily commute, including the house where she would be watering the plants and checking the mail all week for a friend. Incredible, bin Rashid thought to himself. Where the hell is this coming from? The next file was all necessary targeting info on a recently retired senior CIA operations officer, who continued to work on a contract basis in the intelligence field. He spoke Arabic, trained others in tradecraft, counterintelligence,

When process owners like Roos read Introduction to Market-Based Management, they were warned against using the nonprofit support services too much. Because services like accounting and environmental engineering were essentially “free” to people like Roos, there was a danger that those services would be overused. The pamphlet likened the nonprofit groups to government agencies that handed out free services: there was a danger that the nonprofit groups might become bloated and overly expensive. The nonprofits might therefore drag down the performance of the very profit centers that they were supposed to serve. As they grew in size and cost, the nonprofit service centers would suck resources away from the parts of the company that actually made money. “The predictable result was often a corporate overhead cost spiral,” the pamphlet said. To counter this cost spiral, Charles Koch created an internal market system: divisions such as Roos’s had to essentially pay to use the nonprofit groups.

I appreciate you. If you have somebody else who has a Facebook ad account, I'd be happy to give them a free account audit. This audit will give that person a couple of ways to improve their ads. Usually we can save them 10-20% of their cost in just 10 minutes. There's no obligation. If they want to work with us, we will work hard

Kade had his honor, and she respected him for it. But honor was too costly for newcomers in a place like Clotho.

Manufacturers agency costs and, 46-50 characteristics of, 3 custom products and, 6, 14, 15, 33 innovation and, 13-15, 121-131, 147-164 dimensions-of-merit product improvements and, 146 expectations of economic benefit by, 2-9, 33, 51-52, 56 free revealing and, 9, 10, 80 government policy and, 2, 107, 108, 117-119 information asymmetries of, 8, 9, 70-72 innovation and, 1-3, 6-9, 14-17, 27, 33, 37, 45, 49-52, 56, 70-76, 107-119, 133, 136, 147-164, 174 lead users and, 4, 5, 27, 127, 133-136, 144-146 national competitive advantage and, 170-172 social welfare and, 7-13 transaction costs and, 55-57 innovate-or-buy decisions and, 6, 7 Marketing research, 15, 16, 37, 133, 134, 167 Marples, D., 63 Martin, J., 150 Marwell, G., 90 Mathews, J., 25 Maurer, S., 115 McAdam, D., 90 McCool, Rob, 101 Mead, L., 152 Means, R., 56 Meckling, W., 6, 46 Merges, Robert, 113, 114 Merton, Robert, 168 Meyer, M., 99 Microsoft, 13, 128, 151 Midgely, David, 23, 179 Mishina, K., 79 MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 97, 98 Mitchell, R., 40 Molin, M., 129 Mollick, Ethan, 131 Morrison, Pamela, 4, 10, 20, 23-27, 34, 35, 79, 136-143, 179 Mountain biking, 20, 34-37, 72-75, 94 Muniz, A., 174 Nagata, A., 84 Narver, J., 144 National competitive advantage, 170-172. See also Government policy Nelson, R., 68, 84, 113, 114, 170 Niedner, S., 8, 60 Nuvolari, A., 10, 78, 79 Ogawa, S., 8, 71, 72, 108 O’Guinn, T., 174 Oliver, P., 90 Olson, E., 144 Olson, M., 89, 90 Open source software. See also Free software communities and, 172, 174 innovation and, 97-102, 126, 129-132 free revealing and, 9-11, 80, 86, 87 innovation communities and, 11, 93, 96-102, 111, 113, 124, 126, 129-132, 172, 181 intellectual commons and, 115-117 intellectual property rights and, 9, 10, 115-117 knowledge and, 169, 170 Ostrom, E., 90 Outdoor products, 20, 21 Patents. See Intellectual property rights

+1 to the Bomb Surgeon Skill +1 to the Trap Engineer Skill +1 to Unarmed Combat Skill -25% Damage when using bladed weapons +25% Mana cost for damage-dealing spells +5% skill progression speed in all trap-making and bomb-making skills. + 2 Hide in Shadows Skill + Fear spell + 1 Intelligence + 5 Charisma +5 to the Find Trap Skill +5 to the Backfire Skill +5 to the Escape Plan Skill Access to the Desperado Club (already obtained) Access to the Naughty Boys Employment Agency This is an Earth Class. As an incentive to choose an Earth Class, you will receive a Silver Earth Box upon choosing this class. Compensated Anarchists must choose a subclass upon descent to the sixth floor.