“
Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...
”
”
John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids)
“
I prefer your company, Em."
He said it as if it were obvious. I snorted again, assuming he was teasing me. "Over the company of a tavern filled with a rapt and grateful audience? I'm sure you do."
"Over anyone else's company." Again, he said it with some amusement, as if wondering what I was doing speculating about something so evident.
"You are drunk," I said.
"Shall I prove it to you?"
"No, you shan't," I said, alarmed, but he was already sweeping to the floor, bending his knee and taking my hand between his.
"What in God's name are you doing?" I said between my teeth. "And why are you doing it now?"
"Shall I make an appointment?" he said, then laughed. "Yes, I believe you would like that. Well, name the time when it would be convenient for you to receive a declaration of love."
"Oh, get up," I said, furious now. "What sort of jest is this, Wendell?"
"You don't believe me?" He smiled, all mischief, a look I'd seen from other Folk, enough to know not to trust him one inch. "Ask for my true name, and I'll give it to you."
"Why on earth would you do that?" I demanded, yanking my hand back.
"Oh, Em," he said forlornly. "You are the cleverest dolt I have ever met."
I stared at him, my heart thundering. Of course, I am not a dolt in any sense; I had supposed he felt something for me and had only hoped he would keep it to himself. Forever. Not that a part of me didn't wish for the opposite. But that was when I assumed his feelings in that respect were equivalent to what he felt for any of the nameless women who passed in and out of his bed. And why would I lower myself to that, when he and I already had something that was vastly more valuable?
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
“
There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish. You won’t collapse in a heap and need to be rescued by the cat. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of grazing, picking, and snacking. Research has found that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger.6 We eat when we’re bored, when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food (when aren’t we?), when we’re with company, or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good. This is known as hedonic hunger,
”
”
Michael Mosley (The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer)
“
When Mrs. Pattern first came into my life, she was gossiping in the lane with a nursemaid who was wheeling a perambulator containing a baby of exceptional repulsiveness.Babies, as all bachelors will agree, should not be allowed at large unless they are heavily draped, and fitted with various appliances for absorbing sound and moisture. If young married persons persist in their selfish pursuit of populating the planet, they should be compelled to bear the consequences. They should be shut behind high walls, clutching the terrible bundles which they have brought into the world, and when they emerge into society, if they insist on bringing these bundles with them, they should see that they are properly cloaked, muted, sealed up and, above all, dry. They should not wave them about in the streets to the alarm of sensitive persons who are used to the company of Siamese cats.
”
”
Beverley Nichols
“
A British professor of theology once described to me the world to which believers will go as “an unknown country with a well-known inhabitant.” When Jesus Christ the courier has already become well known to us through the Gospels and Pastoral Letters of the New Testament, the prospect of transitioning with him into a world in which we shall see him as he is and be constantly in his company will be something we find alluring rather than alarming.
”
”
J.I. Packer (Finishing Our Course with Joy: Guidance from God for Engaging with Our Aging)
“
This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent,” he wrote, “and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it.” The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants.
”
”
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
“
s ships Phoenix and Rose, in the company of three tenders, cast off their moorings at Staten Island and started up the harbor under full sail, moving swiftly with the favorable wind and a perfect flood tide. Alarm guns sounded in New York. Soldiers
”
”
David McCullough (1776)
“
When a company (e.g. Enron) is calling for more environmental regulation, we need to look very carefully at what they might stand to gain from it… I don’t believe that there is some kind of grand conspiracy to promote scare stories about environmental crisis. I do believe that companies, the media, and politicians benefit from those stories. This confluence of interests goes a long way to explaining why the conversation surrounding climate change has become so detached from scientific reality.
”
”
Bjørn Lomborg
“
Do not act so friendly, Savannah. You are a celebrity. We will have enough attention drawn to us.
They are our neighbors. Try not to scare them to death, will you? Savannah took his arm, grinning up at him teasingly. "You look as fierce as a member of the Mafia. No wonder our neighbors are staring.People tend to be curious.Wouldn't you be if someone moved in next door to you?"
"I don't abide next-door neighbors. When humans consider building in the vicinity of one of my homes, the neighborhood is suddenly inundated with wolves.It works every time." He sounded menacing.
Savannah laughed at him. "You're such a baby,Gregori. Scared of a little company."
"You scare me to death, woman. Because of you I find myself doing things I know are totally insane. Staying in a house built in a crowded city below sea level.Neighbors on top of us.Human butchers surrounding us."
"Like I'm supposed to believe that would scare you," she said smugly,knowing his only worry was for her safety, not his.They turned a corner and headed toward the famous Bourbon Street.
"Try to look less conspicuous," he instructed.
A dog barked, rushed to the end of its lead,and bared its teeth. Gregori turned his head and hissed, exposing white fangs. The dog stopped its aggression instantly,yelped in alarm, and retreated whining.
"What are you doing?" Savannah demanded, outraged.
"Getting a feel for the place," he said absently, his mind clearly on other matters, his senses tuned to the world around him. "Everyone is crazy here, Savannah.You are going to fit right in." He ruffled her hair affectionately.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
Vulnerability is usually attacked, not with fists but with shaming. Many children learn quickly to cover up any signs of weakness, sensitivity, and fragility, as well as alarm, fear, eagerness, neediness, or even curiosity. Above all, they must never disclose that the teasing has hit its mark. Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend.
Signs of alarm may provoke verbal taunts such as “fraidy cat” or “chicken.” Tears evoke ridicule. Expressions of curiosity can precipitate the rolling of eyes and accusations of being weird or nerdy. Manifestations of tenderness can result in incessant teasing. Revealing that something caused hurt or really caring about something is risky around someone uncomfortable with his vulnerability. In the company of the desensitized, any show of emotional openness is likely to be targeted.
The vulnerability engendered by peer orientation can be overwhelming even when children are not hurting one another. This vulnerability is built into the highly insecure nature of peer-oriented relationships. Vulnerability does not have to do only with what is happening but with what could happen — with the inherent insecurity of attachment. What we have, we can lose, and the greater the value of what we have, the greater the potential loss. We may be able to achieve closeness in a relationship, but we cannot secure it in the sense of holding on to it — not like securing a rope or a boat or a fixed interest-bearing government bond.
One has very little control over what happens in a relationship, whether we will still be wanted and loved tomorrow. Although the possibility of loss is present in any relationship, we parents strive to give our children what they are constitutionally unable to give to one another: a connection that is not based on their pleasing us, making us feel good, or reciprocating in any way. In other words, we offer our children precisely what is missing in peer attachments: unconditional acceptance.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
“
Her hands felt their way blindly along the ridges and canyons and defiles of the spine, the firm root-spread hillocks of the withers. She rolled her bony knuckles all along the fallen tree of scar tissue at the crest of the back, prying up its branches, loosening its teeth. And it must be having some effect: when she walked Pelter these days he wasn't the sour fellow he used to be, he was sportive, even funny. She had walked him this morning until the rising sun snagged in the hackberry thicket. As they swung around the barn, she took a carrot from her pocket and gave him the butt and noisily toothed the good half herself. He curvetted like a colt, squealed, and cow-kicked alarmingly near her groin. Okay, okay, she said, and handed it over. She was glad there was no man around just then to tell her to show that horse who was boss. When they were back in the stall and she turned to leave, she found he had taken he whole raincoat in his mouth and was chewing it--the one she was wearing. She twisted around with difficulty and pried it out of his mouth. He eyed her ironically. Just between us, is this the sort of horse act I really ought to discipline? she asked him, smoothing out her coat. I simply incline to your company, he replied.
”
”
Jaimy Gordon (Lord of Misrule (National Book Award))
“
As the fire made its way up Main Street with alarming rapidity, individual homeowners started bidding for the fire companies’ services so as to protect their own houses. Instead of working together as a coordinated unit, the companies split off in different directions, allowing the blaze to build into an uncontrollable
”
”
Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (National Book Award Winner))
“
Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead.
Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo.
“Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?”
Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.”
He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did.
But what I wanted to do was burst into tears.
“Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before.
“Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?”
My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up.
“One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.”
This was all so very, very bad.
“One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“
Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort.
“You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a company that had transported Marilyn before. Anthony Summers reports the possibility that her unsuccessful rescuers could have been Robert Kennedy, or Peter Lawford, or both, responding in alarm to a last slurred phone call from Marilyn.
”
”
Gloria Steinem (Marilyn: Norma Jeane)
“
When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister “went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing, got out the dustpan—which was always a very bad sign—put on her coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard. It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and then she asked Joe why he hadn’t married a Negress Slave at once? Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a better speculation.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
“
Look you," Pandora told him in a businesslike tone, "marriage is not on the table."
Look you? Look you? Gabriel was simultaneously amused and outraged. Was she really speaking to him as if he were an errand boy?
"I've never wanted to marry," Pandora continued. "Anyone who knows me will tell you that. When I was little, I never liked the stories about princesses waiting to be rescued. I never wished on falling stars, or pulled the petals off daisies while reciting 'he loves me, he loves me not.' At my brother's wedding, they handed out slivers of wedding cake to all the unmarried girls and said if we put it under our pillows, we would dream of our future husbands. I ate my cake instead. Every crumb. I've made plans for my life that don't involve becoming anyone's wife."
"What plans?" Gabriel asked. How could a girl of her position, with her looks, make plans that didn't include the possibility of marriage?
"That's none of your business," she told him smartly.
"Understood," Gabriel assured her. "There's just one thing I'd like to ask: What the bloody hell were you doing at the ball in the first place, if you don't want to marry?"
"Because I thought it would be only slightly less boring than staying at home."
"Anyone as opposed to marriage as you claim to be has no business taking part in the Season."
"Not every girl who attends a ball wants to be Cinderella."
"If it's grouse season," Gabriel pointed out acidly, "and you're keeping company with a flock of grouse on a grouse-moor, it's a bit disingenuous to ask a sportsman to pretend you're not a grouse."
"Is that how men think of it? No wonder I hate balls." Pandora looked scornful. "I'm so sorry for intruding on your happy hunting grounds."
"I wasn't wife-hunting," he snapped. "I'm no more interested in marrying than you are."
"Then why were you at the ball?"
"To see a fireworks display!"
After a brief, electric silence, Pandora dropped her head swiftly. He saw her shoulders tremble, and for an alarming moment, he thought she had begun to cry. But then he heard a delicate snorting, snickering sound, and he realized she was... laughing?
"Well," she muttered, "it seems you succeeded."
Before Gabriel even realized what he was doing, he reached out to lift her chin with his fingers. She struggled to hold back her amusement, but it slipped out nonetheless. Droll, sneaky laughter, punctuated with vole-like squeaks, while sparks danced in her blue eyes like shy emerging stars. Her grin made him lightheaded.
Damn it.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Spring (The Ravenels, #3))
“
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world
The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire
And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for
”
”
June Jordan (Passion)
“
Nouns now turn overnight into verbs. We target goals and we access facts. Train conductors announce that the train won’t platform. A sign on an airport door tells me that the door is alarmed. Companies are downsizing. It’s part of an ongoing effort to grow the business. “Ongoing” is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale. We face our daily job with more zest if the boss tells us it’s an ongoing project; we give more willingly to institutions if they have targeted our funds for ongoing needs. Otherwise we might fall prey to disincentivization.
”
”
William Zinsser (On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction)
“
I was forbidden to go to the theater on Friday, but I spent all day Saturday there, and on Saturday the picture ended its run. The picture was about the substitution of automobiles for horse-drawn fire engines. Four fire companies were involved. Three of the teams by replaced by engines and the miserable horses had been sold to brutes. One team remained, but its days were numbered. The men and the horses were sad. Then suddenly there was a great fire. One saw the first engine, the second, and the third race off to the conflagration. Back at the horse-drawn company, things were very gloomy. Then the fourth alarm rang-it was their summons- and they sprang into action, harnessed the team and galloped across the city. They put out the fire, saved the city, and were given amnesty by the Mayor. Now on the stage Ozamanides was writing something obscene on my wife’s buttocks.
”
”
John Cheever (The Stories of John Cheever)
“
Elizabeth snapped awake in a terrified instant as the door to her bed chamber was flung open near dawn, and Ian stalked into the darkened room. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?” he said tightly, coming to stand at the side of her bed.
“What do you mean?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“I mean,” he said, “that either you go first and tell me why in hell you suddenly find my company repugnant, or I’ll go first and tell you how I feel when I don’t know where you are or why you want to be there!”
“I’ve sent word to you both nights.”
“You sent a damned note that arrived long after nightfall both times, informing me that you intended to sleep somewhere else. I want to know why!”
He has men beaten like animals, she reminded herself.
“Stop shouting at me,” Elizabeth said shakily, getting out of bed and dragging the covers with her to hide herself from him.
His brows snapped together in an ominous frown. “Elizabeth?” he asked, reaching for her.
“Don’t touch me!” she cried.
Bentner’s voice came from the doorway. “Is aught amiss, my lady?” he asked, glaring bravely at Ian.
“Get out of here and close that damned door behind you!” Ian snapped furiously.
“Leave it open,” Elizabeth said nervously, and the brave butler did exactly as she said.
In six long strides Ian was at the door, shoving it closed with a force that sent it crashing into its frame, and Elizabeth began to vibrate with terror. When he turned around and started toward her Elizabeth tried to back away, but she tripped on the coverlet and had to stay where she was.
Ian saw the fear in her eyes and stopped short only inches in front of her. His hand lifted, and she winced, but it came to rest on her cheek. “Darling, what is it?” he asked. It was his voice that made her want to weep at his feet, that beautiful baritone voice; and his face-that harsh, handsome face she’d adored. She wanted to beg him to tell her what Robert and Wordsworth had said were lies-all lies. “My life depends on this, Elizabeth. So does yours. Don’t fail us,” Robert had pleaded. Yet, in that moment of weakness she actually considered telling Ian everything she knew and letting him kill her if he wanted to; she would have preferred death to the torment of living with the memory of the lie that had been their lives-to the torment of living without him.
“Are you ill?” he asked, frowning and minutely studying her face.
Snatching at the excuse he’d offered, she nodded hastily. “Yes. I haven’t been feeling well.”
“Is that why you went to London? To see a physician?”
She nodded a little wildly, and to her bewildered horror he started to smile-that lazy, tender smile that always made her senses leap. “Are you with child, darling? Is that why you’re acting so strangely?” Elizabeth was silent, trying to debate the wisdom of saying yes or no-she should say no, she realized. He’d hunt her to the ends of the earth if he believed she was carrying his babe.
“No! He-the doctor said it is just-just-nerves.”
“You’ve been working and playing too hard,” Ian said, looking like the picture of a worried, devoted husband. “You need more rest.”
Elizabeth couldn’t bear any more of this-not his feigned tenderness or his concern or the memory of Robert’s battered back. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said in a strangled voice. “Alone,” she added, and his face whitened as if she had slapped him.
During his entire adult life Ian had relied almost as much on his intuition as on his intellect, and at that moment he didn’t want to believe in the explanation they were both offering. His wife did not want him in her bed; she recoiled from his touch; she had been away for two consecutive nights; and-more alarming than any of that-guilt and fear were written all over her pale face.
“Do you know what a man thinks,” he said in a calm voice that belied the pain streaking through him, “when his wife stays away at night and doesn’t want him in her bed when she does return?
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
The typical home owner suffers a minimum loss of nearly $2,000 in stolen goods or property damage. Burglary is a more common crime that is committed by criminals, says Charles Sczuroski, a former police officer and now senior trainer for the National Crime Prevention Council. Burglary is one of the easiest crimes to prevent, but if it happens at your home or in your office, you can lose a lot of possessions. A break-in, even when you're not there, has really bad impact on you and your families? sense where they feel insecure. There are steps you can take to prevent break INS in your home or in your business. You should have a professional company like Digital Surveillance install security cameras and alarm system at your home or business, so you can monitor when you are away. Footage from Security cameras can be used to prosecute the intruders and get them off streets. CCTV Security Cameras Installation gives you peace of mind and a feel of relaxation weather you are at home or not but you are still able to see what's happening in your absence.
”
”
Digital Surveillance
“
Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. A green monkey, for example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
And you must appear willing to marry me,” Oliver said.
“I understand.”
“Do you? It means you’ll have to act as if you enjoy my company.”
To his surprise, a small smile curved her lips. “I believe I can manage that.” Then, as if realizing she was softening, she wiped the smile from her face. “But you must behave responsibly, too.”
“By not trying to seduce you, you mean.”
She started. “No! I mean, yes…I mean, you already said you have more urgent concerns.” Alarm rose in her cheeks. “Oh dear, I forgot that you also said you have no honor or morals.”
He’d made similar assertions half his life, yet tonight he regretted making them. Shocking young ladies seemed to have lost some of its appeal.
“All the same, Miss Butterfield, I promise that your virtue is safe from me.” When she looked skeptical, he added, “You’re not the sort of woman I prefer.” A respectable woman came with strings attached.
“Of course I’m not,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Anyone can see that.”
That took him aback.
She went on. “A man with no morals isn’t going to want a woman who has them. She’d never let him do anything wicked.”
Freddy coughed, as if choking on something. Oliver understood why. Miss Butterfield had an unnerving way of cutting everything down to its essence.
“Yes,” he said, for lack of a better response. “Quite.” Then he narrowed his gaze on her. “So what did you mean when you said I had to ‘behave responsibly’?”
“You promised to find my fiancé, and I expect you to hold to your word.”
“Ah, right. Your fiancé?” He kept forgetting about that. It was hard to imagine any woman sailing off across the ocean to hunt down her fiancé. No female would ever do such a thing for him.
Not that he’d want her to. That would mean someone cared for him more than was wise, given his character.
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (The Truth About Lord Stoneville (Hellions of Halstead Hall, #1))
“
Why did you come here-that is, why did you agree to reconsider my proposal?”
The question alarmed and startled her. Now that she’d seen him she had only the dimmest, possibly even erroneous recollection of having spoken to him at a ball. Moreover, she couldn’t tell him she was in danger of being cut off by her uncle, for that whole explanation was to humiliating to bear mentioning.
“Did I do or say something during our brief meetings the year before last to mislead you, perhaps, into believing I might yearn for the city life?”
“It’s hard to say,” Elizabeth said with absolute honesty.
“Lady Cameron, do you even remember our meeting?”
“Oh, yes, of course. Certainly,” Elizabeth replied, belatedly recalling a man who looked very like him being presented to her at Lady Markham’s. That was it! “We met at Lady Markham’s ball.”
His gaze never left her face. “We met in the park.”
“In the park?” Elizabeth repeated in sublime embarrassment.
“You had stopped to admire the flowers, and the young gentleman who was your escort that day introduced us.”
“I see,” Elizabeth replied, her gaze skating away from his.
“Would you care to know what we discussed that day and the next day when I escorted you back to the park?”
Curiosity and embarrassment warred, and curiosity won out. “Yes, I would.”
“Fishing.”
“F-fishing?” Elizabeth gasped.
He nodded. “Within minutes after we were introduced I mentioned that I had not come to London for the Season, as you supposed, but that I was on my way to Scotland to do some fishing and was leaving London the very next day.”
An awful feeling of foreboding crept over Elizabeth as something stirred in her memory. “We had a charming chat,” he continued. “You spoke enthusiastically of a particularly challenging trout you were once able to land.”
Elizabeth’s face felt as hot as red coals as he continued, “We quite forgot the time and your poor escort as we shared fishing stories.”
He was quiet, waiting, and when Elizabeth couldn’t endure the damning silence anymore she said uneasily, “Was there…more?”
“Very little. I did not leave for Scotland the next day but stayed instead to call upon you. You abandoned the half-dozen young bucks who’d come to escort you to some sort of fancy soiree and chose instead to go for another impromptu walk in the park with me.”
Elizabeth swallowed audibly, unable to meet his eyes.
“Would you like to know what we talked about that day?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He chucked but ignored her reply, “You professed to be somewhat weary of the social whirl and confessed to a longing to be in the country that day-which is why we went to the park. We had a charming time, I thought.”
When he fell silent, Elizabeth forced herself to meet his gaze and say with resignation, “And we talked of fishing?”
“No,” he said. “Of boar hunting.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes in sublime shame.
“You related an exciting tale of a wild board your father had shot long ago, and of how you watched the hunt-without permission-from the very tree below which the boar as ultimately felled. As I recall,” he finished kindly, “you told me that it was your impulsive cheer that revealed your hiding place to the hunters-and that caused you to be seriously reprimanded by your father.”
Elizabeth saw the twinkle lighting his eyes, and suddenly they both laughed.
“I remember your laugh, too,” he said, still smiling, “I thought it was the loveliest sound imaginable. So much so that between it and our delightful conversation I felt very much at ease in your company.” Realizing he’d just flattered her, he flushed, tugged at his neckcloth, and self-consciously looked away.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
I'm in sore straits, Jeeves.'
'I am sorry to hear that, sir.'
'You'll be sorrier when I explain further. Have you ever seen a garrison besieged by howling savages, with their ammunition down to the last box of cartridges, the water supply giving our and the United States Marines nowhere in sight?'
'Not to my recollection, sir.'
'Well, my position is roughly that of such a garrison, except that compared with me they're sitting pretty. Compared with me they haven't a thing to worry about.'
'You fill me with alarm, sir.'
'I bet I do, and I haven't even started yet. I will begin by saying that Miss Cook, to whom I'm engaged, is a lady for whom I have the utmost esteem and respect, but on certain matters we do not... what's the expression?'
'See eye to eye, sir?'
'That's right. And unfortunately those matters are the what-d'you-call-it of my whole policy. What is it that policies have?'
'I think the word for which you are groping, sir, may possibly be cornerstone.'
'Thank you, Jeeves. She disapproves of a variety of things which are the cornerstone of my policy. Marriage with her must inevitably mean that I shall have to cast them from my life, for she has a will of iron and will have no difficulty in making her husband jump through hoops and snap sugar off his nose. You get what I mean?'
'I do, sir. A very colourful image.'
'Cocktails, for instance, will be barred. She says they are bad for the liver. Have you noticed, by the way, how frightfully lax everything's getting now? In Queen Victoria's day a girl would never have dreamed of mentioning livers in mixed company.'
'Very true, sir. Tempora mutanter, nos et mutamur in illis.'
'That, however, is not the worst.'
'You horrify me, sir.'
'At a pinch I could do without cocktails. It would be agony, but we Woosters can rough it. But she says I must give up smoking.'
'This was indeed the most unkindest cut of all, sir.'
'Give up smoking, Jeeves!'
'Yes, sir. You will notice that I am shuddering.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (Jeeves, #15))
“
We have a deal.”
“The hell you do!” Maria cried out, dashing into the room. She barely noticed that the others stayed behind in the hall.
Nathan looked disconcerted by her appearance, and Oliver looked alarmed. “Leave this to me, Maria,” he said tersely.
“The only way that scoundrel is getting your mother’s pearls,” she shot back,” is if I strangle him with them.” She marched up and snatched the box from Nathan. “Besides, you already have them to me.”
“And you left them behind,” Oliver reminded her. “Gran said you refused to keep them.”
“Well, I want them now.”
“At the risk of being dragged through the courts?” he said, coming to her side. “Of having your name maligned by this vermin?” He lowered his voice. “Do you really want him examining every action you’ve taken in the past two weeks, having it all laid out before a judge?”
She could tell he was thinking of her appearance at the brothel and the unpleasantness there, not to mention her public betrothal to him. “Let him do his worst.” She had an ace in the hole.
She was about to call for Miss Kinsley when Oliver said, “Hyatt won’t let go of this matter without some financial consideration. With 125,000 pounds at stake-“
Nathan’s bark of laughter cut him off. “Is that what she’s told you her half of the company is worth, Lord Stoneville?” Nathan sneered. “Now I understand why a marquess is sniffing around her.”
Oliver’s eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. He seized the man by the throat and slammed him against the wall. “I don’t give a damn what her half of the company is worth, you little worm. She could come to our marriage with nothing but the gown on her back and I wouldn’t care. She’s worth more to me than any amount of money. If you had an ounce of sense, she’d be worth more to you, too.”
As Nathan clawed at Oliver’s hands, struggling for air, Maria hurried to lay her hand on Oliver’s arm. “You promised not to throttle him,” she reminded him, though she was rather enjoying it.
After a second’s hesitation, he released Nathan with a look of disgust.
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (The Truth About Lord Stoneville (Hellions of Halstead Hall, #1))
“
Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
”
”
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
“
But it’s true that I have faced the Dark Court and lived. I suppose I could survive this peril as well, if need be.”
“What? Oh—no. I mean…” Eddi faltered and shook her head. “I’m not good at saying this kind of thing. I always sound stupid or too casual or…”
“My poet, betrayed by words?” He smiled crookedly.
“I never said I was a poet. Besides, it’s not the same thing. This is public speaking.” She smiled weakly and looked at his ruffles. He set his hands on her shoulders, but they were motionless and weightless.
“You’ve kept me alive for the last three months,” Eddie began, groping furiously for the words. “You’ve made me coffee. You’ve carried my amplifier.” A nervous chuckled escaped her. “And you’ve been pretty good company. Even when you were being a jerk, you were pretty good company, now that I look back on it.”
“But,” he said without inflection.
Eddi looked up at him, alarmed. “But? Oh, hell, I told you I was bad at this! No, no buts. You’re a wonderful person. Even if you are a supernatural being. Damn it, Phouka, how am I going to tell my mother that I’m in love with a guy who turns into a dog?” She blushed; she could feel it.
A silence of unreasonable proportions followed; the phouka’s only response was a quick spasm of his fingers on her shoulders. “Are you in love with him, then?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“Not quite.” There was a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth.
“All right, Al right.” Eddi took a long breath. “I love you.”
“There. Now why should that be so hard to say?”
“Because it sounds like something out of a soap opera,” Eddi grumbled.
“Does it? Not to me. The best line from a favorite song, perhaps.” His smile softened his whole face in a way she hadn’t seen before.
“That’s because you’re a damned romantic.”
He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear on one side. “Then you’re a doubly damned romantic, my heart, since you won’t even admit it. But perhaps with my excellent example before you…”
Eddi caught at his disconcerting fingers, which were now tracing the edge of her ear, and kissed his knuckles. “You’re a jerk,” she said fondly. “Where were we going, when we got distracted?”
“Earth and Air, I’d forgotten! It’s your fault, you know. The color of your hair in the moonlight, the curve of your waist, the—”
“You’re going to forget again.”
“You’re quite right. But I’ll try not to do so for at least a few minutes. You will enjoy this, I think.” He flashed her a grin and folded his fingers around hers. “Come along, then.
”
”
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
“
Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.
”
”
Daniel Yergin (The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power)
“
If it will reassure you that I’m not a coward, I suppose I could rearrange his face.” Quietly he added, “The music has ended,” and for the first time Elizabeth realized they were no longer waltzing but were only swaying lightly together. With no other excuse to stand in his arms, Elizabeth tried to ignore her disappointment and step back, but just then the musicians began another melody, and their bodies began to move together in perfect time to the music.
“Since I’ve already deprived you of your escort for the outing to the village tomorrow,” he said after a minute, “would you consider an alternative?”
Her heart soared, because she thought he was going to offer to escort her himself. Again he read her thoughts, but his words were dampening.
“I cannot escort you there,” he said flatly.
Her smile faded. “Why not?”
“Don’t be a henwit. Being seen in my company is hardly the sort of thing to enhance a debutante’s reputation.”
Her mind whirled, trying to tally some sort of balance sheet that would disprove his claim. After all, he was a favorite of the Duke of Hammund’s…but while the duke was considered a great matrimonial prize, his reputation as a libertine and rake made mamas fear him as much as they coveted him as a son-in-law. On the other hand, Charise Dumont was considered perfectly respectable by the ton, and so this country gathering was above reproach. Except it wasn’t, according to Lord Howard. “Is that why you refused to dance with me when I asked you to earlier?”
“That was part of the reason.”
“What was the rest of it?” she asked curiously.
His chuckle was grim. “Call it a well-developed instinct for self-preservation.”
“What?”
“Your eyes are more lethal than dueling pistols, my sweet,” he said wryly. “They could make a saint forget his goal.”
Elizabeth had heard many flowery praises sung to her beauty, and she endured them with polite disinterest, but Ian’s blunt, almost reluctant flattery made her chuckle. Later she would realize that at this moment she had made her greatest mistake of all-she had been lulled into regarding him as an equal, a gently bred person whom she could trust, even relax with. “What sort of alternative were you going to suggest for tomorrow?”
“Luncheon,” he said. “Somewhere private where we can talk, and where we won’t be seen together.”
A cozy picnic luncheon for two was definitely not on Lucinda’s list of acceptable pastimes for London debutantes, but even so, Elizabeth was reluctant to refuse. “Outdoors…by the lake?” she speculated aloud, trying to justify the idea by making it public.
“I think it’s going to rain tomorrow, and besides, we’d risk being seen together there.”
“Then where?”
“In the woods. I’ll meet you at the woodcutter’s cottage at the south end of the property near the stream at eleven. There's a path that leads to it two miles from the gate-off the main road." Elizabeth was too alarmed by such a prospect to stop to wonder how and when Ian Thornton had become so familiar with Charise's property and all its secluded haunts.
"Absolutely not," she said in a shaky, breathless voice. Even she was not naïve enough to consider being alone with a man in a cottage, and she was terribly disappointed that he'd suggested it. Gentlemen didn't make such suggestions, and well-bred ladies never accepted them. Lucinda's warnings about such things had been eloquent and, Elizabeth felt, sensible.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
And an image had appeared in Christopher's head... not the usual ones of the war, but a peaceful one... Beatrix's face, calm and intent, as she had tended a wounded bird the previous day. She had wrapped the broken wing of a small sparrow against its body, and then showed Rye how to feed the bird. As Christopher had watched the proceedings, he had been struck by the mixture of delicacy and strength in Beatrix's hands.
Bringing his attention back to the ranting woman before him, Christopher pitied the man who eventually became Prudence's husband.
Prudence's mother had come into the parlor then, alarmed by the uproar, Christopher had taken his leave soon after, regretting every minute he had ever wasted in Prudence Mercer's company.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
And an image had appeared in Christopher's head... not the usual ones of the war, but a peaceful one... Beatrix's face, calm and intent, as she had tended a wounded bird the previous day. She had wrapped the broken wing of a small sparrow against its body, and then showed Rye how to feed the bird. As Christopher had watched the proceedings, he had been struck by the mixture of delicacy and strength in Beatrix's hands.
Bringing his attention back to the ranting woman before him, Christopher pitied the man who eventually became Prudence's husband.
Prudence's mother had come into the parlor then, alarmed by the uproar, and she had tried to soothe her. Christopher had taken his leave soon after, regretting every minute he had ever wasted in Prudence Mercer's company.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
When the South woke up to the loss of its once guaranteed workforce, it tried to find ways to intercept it. Southern authorities resurrected the anti-enticement laws originally enacted after the Civil War to keep newly freed slaves from being lured away, this time, however, aimed at northern companies coveting the South’s cheapest and most desperate workers. “Conditions recently became so alarming—that is, so many Negroes were leaving,” wrote an Alabama official, that the state began making anyone caught enticing blacks away—labor agents, they were called—pay an annual license fee of $750 “in every county in which he operates or solicits emigrants” or be “fined as much as $500 and sentenced to a year’s hard labor.
”
”
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
“
Sharon did have house guests to keep her company, though. Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folger Coffee Company and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski, were also living at Cielo Drive. On the evening of August 8, 1969, Sharon made phone calls to her sister and her friend to cancel plans she had made, saying that she was tired and would spend the night in with another friend, Jay Sebring. The foursome, Sharon, Jay, Abigail, and Wojciech, ate at a local Mexican restaurant before returning to Sharon’s home at Cielo Drive. At 11.30 pm, Manson took his follower and right-hand man Tex Watson to one side and explained to him what he had to do. For the good of the family, Manson said, Tex had to lead the others to Cielo Drive to “totally destroy everyone in that house” and steal whatever they could. It’s unclear whether Manson even knew who was now living in that particular house, but he must have known they were rich and that they would serve as an example to the rest of the world that no one was safe. Manson rounded up Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and new follower Linda Kasabian. Dressed in black, the girls grabbed their knives and jumped into the car with Tex. Manson rested at Spahn Ranch, waiting for news from 10050 Cielo Drive. When the group arrived at the house, Tex climbed a telephone pole and snipped the wire. It was only now that the group had arrived that Tex told the girls exactly what they were there to do. If the girls were shocked, they didn’t show it, and they dutifully followed Tex’s lead in what came next. Steve Parent, an 18-year-old friend of the caretaker at Cielo Drive, was the first to be murdered. Parent was leaving the property in his car, having just visited his friend, when Tex shot him four times. Tex then entered the house through an open window and told the girls to follow him inside. New follower Kasabian was terrified and unable to help, so Tex told her to go back to the car and keep watch. In the sitting room of the house, Tex woke Wojciech who had fallen asleep on the couch, and Susan ventured upstairs where she found Abigail reading in bed. Abigail saw Susan but wasn’t alarmed at first. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to be in the house. But when Susan brandished a large knife and told Abigail, Sharon, and Jay to go with her downstairs, the group were terrified. Tex tied a rope around Wojciech’s throat, threw it over a beam in the house, and tied it around Sharon’s throat. Tex demanded money and grew furious when no one produced any, then he shot Jay in the stomach. As Sharon and Abigail screamed in terror, Tex stabbed Jay, over and over again. Realizing that no one was going to escape alive if he didn’t do something, Wojciech tried to break free, causing Susan to attack him with a knife. Wojciech was able to overpower Susan, so Tex shot him twice then battered him with the handle of his gun. Incredibly, Wojciech still managed to escape the house, but Tex caught up with him on the lawn and ended his life with a knife. Abigail also broke free of Patricia, but she caught her and stabbed her repeatedly. Tex finally ended Abigail’s life with his knife. Sharon was the only person still alive in the house; she pleaded for her life and the life of her unborn child. As Sharon begged, Susan Atkin’s began stabbing her, being sure to stab her directly through her pregnant stomach. Later, Susan said she “got sick of listening to her so I stabbed her and then I just stabbed her and she fell and I stabbed her again, just kept stabbing and stabbing.” The group almost left without writing the bloody graffiti Manson had explicitly told them to leave behind. Susan went back into the house and used a towel to write “PIG” on the front door of 10500 Cielo Drive in the victims’ blood.
”
”
Hourly History (Charles Manson: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Criminals))
“
For more than 30 years, Crimson Alarm has been a leader in custom-designed security and smart home solutions. Our customer service and advanced technology bring you unparalleled support and reliability.
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”
”
Crimson Alarm
“
Organizations seeking to commercialize open source software realized this, of course, and deliberately incorporated it as part of their market approach. In a 2013 piece on Pando Daily, venture capitalist Danny Rimer quotes then-MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos as saying, “The relational database market is a $9 billion a year market. I want to shrink it to $3 billion and take a third of the market.” While MySQL may not have succeeded in shrinking the market to three billion, it is interesting to note that growing usage of MySQL was concurrent with a declining ability of Oracle to sell new licenses. Which may explain both why Sun valued MySQL at one third of a $3 billion dollar market and why Oracle later acquired Sun and MySQL. The downward price pressure imposed by open source alternatives have become sufficiently visible, in fact, as to begin raising alarm bells among financial analysts. The legacy providers of data management systems have all fallen on hard times over the last year or two, and while many are quick to dismiss legacy vendor revenue shortfalls to macroeconomic issues, we argue that these macroeconomic issues are actually accelerating a technology transition from legacy products to alternative data management systems like Hadoop and NoSQL that typically sell for dimes on the dollar. We believe these macro issues are real, and rather than just causing delays in big deals for the legacy vendors, enterprises are struggling to control costs and are increasingly looking at lower cost solutions as alternatives to traditional products. — Peter Goldmacher Cowen and Company
”
”
Stephen O’Grady (The Software Paradox: The Rise and Fall of the Commercial Software Market)
“
Then, in 1942, a disastrous strike against the record companies disrupted the industry and upset the delicate balance of business. Though it hit directly at record producers, the real target was radio. James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, was alarmed at the rapid proliferation of disc jockeys. He objected to the free use of recorded music on the air, charging that jocks had cost musicians their jobs at hundreds of radio stations. Petrillo wanted to impose fees at the source, the big companies like RCA and Columbia, where the records were produced. The final agreement, which was not accepted by the two biggest companies until 1944, created a union-supervised fund for indigent and aging musicians
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
During a time in which clean-tech businesses have gone bankrupt with alarming regularity, Musk has built two of the most successful clean-tech companies in the world. The Musk Co. empire of factories, tens of thousands of workers, and industrial might has incumbents on the run and has turned Musk into one of the richest men in the world, with a net worth around $10 billion. The visit to
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
“
The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. Its river had run dry. It was one thing for outsiders to say that the company was no longer innovative, but another thing altogether for that critique to come from someone who had helped birth multitouch technology for the iPhone. They worried it would poison morale and moved to contain the damage. Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri. The move had crushing financial ramifications. Chaudhri would no longer receive his shares. Stung, he complained to friends about the dismissal, telling them that Ive and Dye misunderstood his comment about the river. He explained to those people that the email was a personal reflection on his own lack of joy, not a comment on Apple.
”
”
Tripp Mickle (After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul)
“
life insurance companies have been reporting alarming increases in all-cause mortality and disability in working-age people. We may be experiencing both a huge human tragedy as well as a profound failure of the US government to serve and protect its citizens. We may be forced to conclude that the genetic vaccines that were so aggressively promoted have failed and the federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life.
”
”
Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
“
All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations. Many of us are familiar by now with the basic contours of this situation. We know that the “free” social media platforms we use aren’t really free, because, as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being sold: in other words, the technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention, then selling it to advertisers.
”
”
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
“
The WBR is an important embodiment of how metrics are put into action at Amazon, but it isn’t the only one. Metrics dashboards and reports are established by every engineering, operations, and business unit at the company. In many cases metrics are monitored in real time, and each critical technical and operational service receives an “alarm” to ensure that failures and outages are identified instantly. In other cases, teams rely on dashboards that are updated hourly or daily for their metrics.
”
”
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
“
But it’s true that I have faced the Dark Court and lived. I suppose I could survive this peril as well, if need be.”
“What? Oh—no. I mean…” Eddi faltered and shook her head. “I’m not good at saying this kind of thing. I always sound stupid or too casual or…”
“My poet, betrayed by words?” He smiled crookedly.
“I never said I was a poet. Besides, it’s not the same thing. This is public speaking.” She smiled weakly and looked at his ruffles. He set his hands on her shoulders, but they were motionless and weightless.
“You’ve kept me alive for the last three months,” Eddie began, groping furiously for the words. “You’ve made me coffee. You’ve carried my amplifier.” A nervous chuckled escaped her. “And you’ve been pretty good company. Even when you were being a jerk, you were pretty good company, now that I look back on it.”
“But,” he said without inflection.
Eddi looked up at him, alarmed. “But? Oh, hell, I told you I was bad at this! No, no buts. You’re a wonderful person. Even if you are a supernatural being. Damn it, Phouka, how am I going to tell my mother that I’m in love with a guy who turns into a dog?” She blushed; she could feel it.
A silence of unreasonable proportions followed; the phouka’s only response was a quick spasm of his fingers on her shoulders. “Are you in love with him, then?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“Not quite.” There was a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth.
“All right, All right.” Eddi took a long breath. “I love you.”
“There. Now why should that be so hard to say?”
“Because it sounds like something out of a soap opera,” Eddi grumbled.
“Does it? Not to me. The best line from a favorite song, perhaps.” His smile softened his whole face in a way she hadn’t seen before.
“That’s because you’re a damned romantic.”
He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear on one side. “Then you’re a doubly damned romantic, my heart, since you won’t even admit it. But perhaps with my excellent example before you…”
Eddi caught at his disconcerting fingers, which were now tracing the edge of her ear, and kissed his knuckles. “You’re a jerk,” she said fondly. “Where were we going, when we got distracted?”
“Earth and Air, I’d forgotten! It’s your fault, you know. The color of your hair in the moonlight, the curve of your waist, the—”
“You’re going to forget again.”
“You’re quite right. But I’ll try not to do so for at least a few minutes. You will enjoy this, I think.” He flashed her a grin and folded his fingers around hers. “Come along, then.
”
”
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
“
Section 13-2921 - Harassment; classification; definition A. A person commits harassment if, with intent to harass or with knowledge that the person is harassing another person, the person:
1. Anonymously or otherwise contacts, communicates or causes a communication with another person by verbal, electronic, mechanical, telegraphic, telephonic or written means in a manner that harasses.
2. Continues to follow another person in or about a public place for no legitimate purpose after being asked to desist.
3. Repeatedly commits an act or acts that harass another person.
4. Surveils or causes another person to surveil a person for no legitimate purpose.
5. On more than one occasion makes a false report to a law enforcement, credit or social service agency.
6. Interferes with the delivery of any public or regulated utility to a person. B. A person commits harassment against a public officer or employee if the person, with intent to harass, files a nonconsensual lien against any public officer or employee that is not accompanied by an order or a judgment from a court of competent jurisdiction authorizing the filing of the lien or is not issued by a governmental entity or political subdivision or agency pursuant to its statutory authority, a validly licensed utility or water delivery company, a mechanics' lien claimant or an entity created under covenants, conditions, restrictions or declarations affecting real property. C. Harassment under subsection A is a class 1 misdemeanor. Harassment under subsection B is a class 5 felony. D. This section does not apply to an otherwise lawful demonstration, assembly or picketing. E. For the purposes of this section, "harassment" means conduct that is directed at a specific person and that would cause a reasonable person to be seriously alarmed, annoyed or harassed and the conduct in fact seriously alarms, annoys or harasses the person. A.R.S. § 13-2921 Section 13-2921.01 - Aggravated harassment; classification; definition A. A person commits aggravated harassment if the person commits harassment as provided in section 13-2921 and any of the following applies:
1. A court has issued an order of protection or an injunction against harassment against the person and in favor of the victim of harassment and the order or injunction has been served and is still valid.
2. The person has previously been convicted of an offense included in section 13-3601. B. The victim of any previous offense shall be the same as in the present offense. C. A person who violates subsection A, paragraph 1 of this section is guilty of a class 6 felony. A person who commits a second or subsequent violation of subsection A, paragraph 1 of this section is guilty of a class 5 felony. A person who violates subsection A, paragraph 2 of this section is guilty of a class 5 felony. D. For the purposes of this section, "convicted" means a person who was convicted of an offense included in section 13-3601 or who was adjudicated delinquent for conduct that would constitute a historical prior felony conviction if the juvenile had been tried as an adult for an offense included in section 13-3601. A.R.S. § 13-2921.01
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Arizona Legislature (ARIZONA REVISED STATUTES TITLE 13 CRIMINAL CODE 2022 EDITION: WEST HARTFORD LEGAL PUBLISHING)
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Sample Quarterly Review Summary Successes Maintained peak-performance habits Stabilized the company and team Raised funds for next phase of growth Upgraded company-wide marketing Launched leadership development program Failures Worked too much, felt worn out Failed to follow-up on marketing project on time Missed language learning goals in Portuguese Extended two project deadlines unnecessarily Didn’t spend sufficient time with family and friends Insights Perfectionism is a big development opportunity Reading should be scheduled into the day The mind needs to be trained as much as the body Weekly reviews must result in new weekly commitments I want to become world-class at peak performance Actions Determine what are the non-negotiables in my life Increase output with a color-coded master calendar Bring the joy/be more intentional Hire a virtual assistant Create a weekly accountability checklist
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Eric Partaker (The 3 Alarms: A Simple System to Transform Your Health, Wealth, and Relationships Forever)
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He was in the immediate company of a man even the Assassins’ Guild was frightened of, another man who would stay up all night in order to invent an alarm clock to wake him up in the morning, and a man who had never knowingly changed his underwear.
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Terry Pratchett (Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4))
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God reflected back on a scene that he witnessed at Sodom, which had become too typical. A man entered a house, sat down in a chair, and quietly waited. Two children sat on the opposite side of the room. They stared at the man with their chins on their fists. The man stood up to move a foot rest close to the kids. He leaned forward to quietly explain, “I am here… to make… sweet love… to your daddy’s ass. Now listen… children… you might hear some… raucous noise… from that room… down that hall,” the man pointed towards the last door down a hall, “But don’t… be… alarmed. That’s just the sound… of two men… enjoying… the company of each other.
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Dylan Callens (Operation Cosmic Teapot)
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No sugarcoating would be necessary,” Matthew interrupted calmly. “Daisy…that is, Miss Bowman, is entirely—” Beautiful. Desirable. Bewitching. “—acceptable. Marrying a woman like Miss Bowman would be a reward in itself.”
“Good,” Bowman grunted, clearly unconvinced. “Very gentlemanly of you to say so. Still, I will offer you fair recompense in the form of a generous dowry, more shares in the company and so forth. You will be quite satisfied, I assure you. Now as to the wedding arrangements—”
“I didn’t say yes,” Matthew interrupted.
Bowman stopped pacing and sent him a questioning stare.
“To start with,” Matthew continued carefully, “it is possible Miss Bowman will find a suitor within the next two months.”
“She will find no suitors of your caliber,” Bowman said smugly.
Matthew replied gravely despite his amusement. “Thank you. But I don’t believe Miss Bowman shares your high opinion.”
The older man made a dismissive gesture. “Bah. Women’s minds are as changeable as English weather. You can persuade her to like you. Give her a posy of flowers, throw a few compliments in her direction…better yet, quote something from one of those blasted poetry books she reads. Seducing a woman is easily accomplished, Swift. All you have to do is—”
“Mr. Bowman,” Matthew interrupted with a sudden touch of alarm. God in heaven, all he needed was an explanation of courtship techniques from his employer. “I believe I could manage that without any advice. That’s not the issue.”
“Then what…ah.” Bowman gave him a man-of-the-world smile. “I understand.”
“You understand what?” Matthew asked apprehensively.
“Obviously you fear my reaction if you should decide later on that my daughter is not adequate to your needs. But as long as you behave with discretion, I won’t say a word.”
Matthew sighed and rubbed his eyes, suddenly feeling weary. This was a bit much to face so soon after his ship had landed in Bristol. “You’re saying you’ll look the other way if I stray from my wife,” he said rather than asked.
“We men face temptations. Sometimes we stray. It is the way of the world.”
“It’s not my way,” Matthew said flatly. “I stand by my word, both in business and in my personal life. If or when I promise to be faithful to a woman, I would be. No matter what.”
Bowman’s heavy mustache twitched with amusement. “You’re still young enough to afford scruples.”
“The old can’t afford them?” Matthew asked with a touch of affectionate mockery.
“Some scruples have a way of becoming overpriced. You’ll discover that someday.”
“God, I hope not.” Matthew sank into a chair and buried his head in his hands, his fingers tunneling through the heavy locks of his hair.
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Lisa Kleypas (Scandal in Spring (Wallflowers, #4))
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Kids are one of natural most perfect learning devices. With just a little knowing, a kid can be activated and kept content. Starting early in your kid's growth can do wonderful factors for their psychological growth in later years, and provides them a large boost over other kids their age. Comprehend youngsters are designed to comprehend. Regular actions, such as offering, diapering, enjoying, executing, going for a generate in the child baby stroller, and getting bears from Grandpa are all "educational". You do not need to do synthetic actions or extremely concentrate on "educational activities" for a kid to succeed. Care for the kid. A kid needs a full belly, a dry diaper, a comfortable atmosphere, and really like for the best possible growth. Discuss to the kid. Provide a "play by play" of what you're doing (making a cup of tea, modifying a diaper, confirming the email box. Take part in kid talk; it's designed to stimulate a kid. Read a book together. Increase and massage. Kids really like to move their systems. Learn kid massage and kid yoga exercise exercises, which help comfortable, revitalize, and stimulate. But simply shifting the kid in a way he or she likes (like clapping arms, wearing coming back and forth, "So Big!") is outstanding work out, and properly rubbing kid down with kid massage oil is outstanding for sensitive growth. Acquire a execute gym or action gym. These are generally a company recommended with children from child up to about 12 months. They mostly come in the form of comfortable, quilted or properly cushioning execute shields, sometimes raised at the edges with a space in the center for kid. They can include detachable, holding locations for small children to try to comprehend. They usually have locations that are crinkle, smooth, scrunchy styles for kid to touch, media and action. Some come with bright dazzling illumination and alarm systems and others make insane seems to be, or musical show show seems to be, and some even do both. Look around. Kids are fascinated by factors grownups take for granted: Automobiles visiting outside the screen, tanks, vegetation provided by the wind, failing outfits in the outfits clothing dryer. Go outside A child baby stroller generate can be very interesting, going to uncommon new locations like the mailing service, bakery, recreation area, and so on.Drive your car, which has best car accessories, and go for a have a eat outside. Perform to the kid. Perform child's room music, TV jingles, your popular.Play with the kid. Conventional activities like "Peek-A-Boo" or cheap baby toys, the hug the kid's belly, shifting a football coming back and forth on are outstanding kid actions. Dance with the kid in your arms.
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angeladong
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Facebook was a scary competitor because in some ways it was very much like Google. True, Facebook wasn’t built on a brilliant scientific advance as Google was, and there was no technical innovation at Facebook even close to the breathtaking Google infrastructure. But Mark Zuckerberg was in the Larry Page mold, a wildly ambitious leader with a quasi-religious trust in engineering. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would have hacker values. Ten years younger than Page and Brin—a generation in Internet time—Zuckerberg respected Google’s values but believed that the older company had lost its nimbleness and focus. He made a specialty of hiring Google people who sought the excitement of building something new. When Zuckerberg needed a strong number two to run Facebook operations, he turned to Sheryl Sandberg, who had built Google’s ad organization. As disappointing as that was to Google, what was even more alarming was the competition for engineering talent. Google could deal with its most brilliant engineers leaving to start their own companies—classic examples were the departure of Paul Buchheit (Gmail) and Bret Taylor (Google Maps) to start a company called FriendFeed. But when Facebook bought FriendFeed, both engineers happily integrated themselves into the ranks of their new employer.
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Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
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The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on
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Giles Whittell (Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War)
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In the European countries, the newly rich industrialists stood in opposition to the old money of the royal families. Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven described how these European industrialists and royal families competed for the workers’ allegiance. This gave the workers more leverage to gain concessions, such as better workplace conditions and national health care. Piven and Cloward noted the marked difference between European and American labor history. When the industrialists rose up in the U.S. after the 1860s Civil War, there was no aristocracy standing in opposition to them. As workers in the factories tried to organize for better wages and conditions, the industrialists initially used violence against them, but soon employed more sophisticated strategies.21 The opium-trafficking families ramped up their importation of drugs by the end of the 1800s. Companies marketed much of the imported opium and its first derivative, morphine, in medicines. But at least a quarter of imported opium was intended for smoking. By 1900 over 1% of the U.S. population was addicted to opium. Addiction to opium, particularly heroin, rose “at alarming rates” in 1903, in parallel with a rise of worker activism.
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John L. Potash (Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists)
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who was super annoyed to have you clogging up his tiny room. You were allowed to stay as long as you kept using your tongue. Hopefully, this doghouse had sick drinks. And free money. And those soft bones in sauce they sometimes served at company parties. Even if he was only permitted to sniff them, because of his feeding regimen. “The light, the space, my God!” Carl found himself saying to the small, perfectly dressed host, who stood on the landing. The host greeted Carl with alarm. Carl reached up, too late, to cover his face. He didn’t want to be a burden—at least, not to just anyone. And yet, fuck this guy. Didn’t Emily Post have a whole chapter on hiding all reaction to astonishing creatures who appeared at your door? Shutting your little face down so as not to reveal the horror and disgust you might really feel? To the host, Carl said, grinning far too hard, “Just show me to my rooms and I’ll get
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Anonymous
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It is easy for the leader of a business to take a quick look at Kumasi, and at the thousands of up-and-coming cities in the developing world, and conclude that his or her company is not missing out on all that much by not being there today. But at a time of rapid, surprising change, snapshots that capture a moment in economic time can be deeply misleading. In this age of Instagram, we must apply new filters to the mental and financial pictures we take. Our intuition—the nerve center that turns images into narratives—has to reset so that it processes the incoming data intelligently. The portraits we take of cities must capture the dynamism underneath the surface and highlight the brightness of opportunities, while toning down the alarming flares of risk. Most of all, they must be able to project forward motion.
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Richard Dobbs (No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends)
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As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell’s alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company’s 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, “We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy…Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.” Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies “equal time” to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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Sound the call to attention,” Ned told the bugler.
The goblin put the instrument to his lips, but after a pause he lowered it. “What’s that sound like? I forget.”
Ned strained his memory. It’d been a while since he’d heard it himself. “I think it goes da-da-da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, dum-dum-da-dee.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s the dismissal song,” said Frank. “Call to attention has more pep. Da-dee-da-dee, dum-dum-dee-dum, dee-dee, I believe.”
“I thought it was more like dee-dee-dee-dee, dum-dum-dee-, dee-dee-doh,” said Gabel.
“You’re both wrong,” countered Regina. “It’s dum-dum-dee-dee, dum-dum-dee-dum.”
“That’s the orcish wedding march,” said Gabel. “Call to attention has more ooomphh.”
“What’s ooomphh?” asked Frank.
“It’s half the pep,” said Gabel, “and about three-quarters more pizzazz.”
“There’s no pizzazz in the call to attention,” said Regina, “and if you ask me, he’s already overdoing the pep.”
The insulted bugler balked. “My pep is always dead-on, I’ll have you know. My pizzazz is nearly perfect. I’ll grant you my ooomphh isn’t always on target, but I’d say a touch more shebang and a healthy dose of zing is what’s required here. I could throw in a little wawawa as well. That never hurts.”
“There’s no place for wawawa in legitimate military music,” said Regina.
“Yes,” agreed Gabel. “Just stick with the ooomphh.”
“No shebang either?” said the bugler.
“I guess you could put in a little shebang,” said Gabel, “but if I even hear one note of wawawa I’ll have you thrown in the brig.”
Though small, the bugler’s slight chest was mostly lungs, and he unleashed a long blast of musical improvisation. The discordant tune filled the citadel. The orcs and goblins nodded along appreciatively, while everyone else covered their ears. The powerful sound floated all the way to the roc pens where the giant birds proceeded to tear at each other in panicked alarm. Caught up in the performance, the bugler kept on playing until Ned gave the order to stop, and Regina yanked away his instrument.
The sweaty bugler gasped. “How was that?”
“Too much zoop,” said Frank.
“Not enough zing,” added Gabel.
“No bop at all,” said Regina.
The goblin snatched back his bugle. “Everybody’s a critic.
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A. Lee Martinez (In the Company of Ogres)
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I tried to compose a letter to my father this morning, while you beavered away on my mundane business, and somehow, Mrs. Seaton, I could not come up with words to adequately convey to my father the extent to which I want him to just leave me the hell alone.” He finished that statement through clenched teeth, alarming Anna with the animosity in his tone, but he wasn’t finished. “I have come to the point,” the earl went on, “where I comprehend why my older brothers would consider the Peninsular War preferable to the daily idiocy that comes with being Percival Windham’s heir. I honestly believe that could he but figure a way to pull it off, my father would lock me naked in a room with the woman of his choice, there to remain until I got her pregnant with twin boys. And I am not just frustrated”—the earl’s tone took on a sharper edge—“I am ready to do him an injury, because I don’t think anything less will make an impression. Two unwilling people are going to wed and have a child because my father got up to tricks.” “Your father did not force those two people into one another’s company all unawares and blameless, my lord, but why not appeal to your mother? By reputation, she is the one who can control him.” The earl shook his head. “Her Grace is much diminished by the loss of my brother Victor. I do not want to importune her, and she will believe His Grace only meant well.” Anna smiled ruefully. “And she wants grandchildren, too, of course.” “Why, of course.” The earl gestured impatiently. “She had eight children and still has six. There will be grandchildren, and if for some reason the six of us are completely remiss, I have two half siblings, whose children she will graciously spoil, as well.” “Good heavens,” Anna murmured. “So your father has sired ten children, and yet he plagues you?” “He does. Except for the one daughter of Victor’s, none of us have seen fit to reproduce. There was a rumor Bart had left us something to remember him by, but he likely started the rumor himself just to aggravate my father.
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Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
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There is a pleasure you could allow me, Anna.” He kept using her name, she thought, using it like a caress, a reminder that he knew the taste of her. “There are many pleasures I could allow you,” she said, caution in her tone, “few that I will.” “So I’m to earn your favors?” He merely smiled. “Then, allow me this: The heat and our rambling are threatening the integrity of your coiffure. Let me brush your hair.” “Brush my…?” Anna blinked and gave him a puzzled look. “I used to brush Her Grace’s hair when I was small, then my sisters’. I’ve taken a turn or two with Rose, but she demands a certain dispatch only her step-papa and mama seem to have perfected.” “You want to brush my hair,” Anna said, as if to herself. “That is an unusual request.” “But not too unusual. It requires no removal of clothing nor touching of the hands nor lascivious glances.” “All right,” Anna said, more perplexed than alarmed, but then, she was in the company of a man who scheduled his passions. She fished inside the hamper and withdrew her reticule, producing a small bone-handled brush. “Pretty little thing,” the earl remarked, thumbing the bristles. “Now”—he sat up—“sit you here.” He thumped the blanket beside him, and Anna scooted, only to find that the earl had shifted so she sat between his bent knees. “Is this decent?” she murmured. “Have another glass of wine,” the earl suggested. “It will feel frustratingly decent.” They fell silent, and Anna felt the earl’s fingers easing through her hair to find her hairpins. He slid them free carefully and began piling them to one side. When the bun at the nape of Anna’s neck was loosened, he let her thick plait tumble down her back. “I like this part,” he said. “When you free up a braid, and a single shiny rope becomes skeins and curls and riots of silky, soft hair. How do you keep it so fragrant?” She felt him lean in for a sniff, and her heart nearly skipped a beat. “I make a shampoo scented with roses.” And ye gods, it had been a struggle to utter that single coherent sentence. His hands were lacing through her unbound hair to massage her scalp and the back of her neck. His touch was perfect—deliberate, knowing, and competent without using too much strength. He trailed her hair down her back, leaving little trickles of pleasure to skitter along her spine, and then she felt him gathering the mass of it, to move it to one side. “It’s beautiful,” he murmured, his words breathed near her ear. “I’m going to forbid you to wear those hideous caps of yours when we return to Town.” His
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Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
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Employee Engagement
“Employee Engagement” has become a very hot topic in recent years. The escalating statistics for disengagement are alarming. In 2015, the Gallup Polls’ “The State of the American Workforce” survey found that only 32.5 percent of the U.S. Workforce is engaged and committed where they work, and 54 percent say they would consider leaving their companies if they could receive a 20 percent raise elsewhere. Disengagement not only lowers performance, morale, and productivity, but it’s costing employers billions of dollars a year. It's a growing problem, which has many companies baffled.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #4))
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We knew that the prospect of our little studio being absorbed into a much larger entity would worry many people. While we’d worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I’ll say more about the specific steps we took to protect Pixar in a later chapter, but here I want to discuss what happened when, in my eagerness to ease my colleagues’ fears, I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” This happened enough that I called another company-wide meeting to explain myself. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we aren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I was glad I’d cleared that up. Except that I hadn’t. In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. What was interesting to me was that the changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. These were the normal adjustments that have to be made when a business expands and evolves. It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
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I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.
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Christopher Bollen (Orient)
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The company has recently made a push into the activity-tracking space — competing with Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and others — with two devices: the Activité, a step-and-sleep tracker that looks like a regular mechanical watch, and the Pulse O2, a fitness monitor that can also check a user’s heart rate. I thought that I would find the activity trackers indispensable. But within a month I discovered that I didn’t have a particularly strong commitment to wanting to keep track of my daily activity levels, and I stopped using them. To my surprise in the end the product I now use most regularly is the one I was most hesitant to try: the Aura sleep-tracking system. The Aura is a futuristic-looking alarm clock-like device that connects to Wi-Fi and includes a sensitive, wire-connected monitoring pad that goes underneath a user’s mattress. The system keeps track of heart rate, time spent in REM sleep and deep sleep (based, in part, on body motion and breathing cycle), and room temperature (a recent update allows it to connect with Nest smart thermostats to adjust temperature for maximum sleep comfort).
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Anonymous
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BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.
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Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
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Women face a persistent double bind when it comes to their leadership capabilities—she has a higher chance of being liked if she behaves in a “feminine” way, but she’s probably not respected or seen as a leader. If she operates in a “masculine” way, however, she’s more likely to be called names like “bossy” (or worse) and disliked. What’s alarming is that if a company already has one female executive leader, another woman’s chances of landing one of the organization’s five highest-paid executive positions falls by 51%, research finds.
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Ruchika Tulshyan (The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality In the Workplace)
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Pharmaceutical companies split up one serious side effect into several minor groups to prevent their drug from not being approved. This is an established method to keep alarming adverse effects below the one percent level. Amnesia for instance can be split into confusion, memory weakness, senility, dementia and impaired cognitive function. A serious and rather common problem simply falls apart when split into small groups.
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Uffe Ravnskov (Ignore the awkward! How the cholesterol myths are kept alive)
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the Sea Venture was the largest vessel in the fleet, she was small compared with all but the most modest, modern oceangoing vessels. Described as a galleon, she was in reality a merchant ship, properly called a carrack. The ship’s provenance is uncertain. It is believed that she was about six years old and that she was owned by a group of businessmen known as the Company of Merchant Adventurers, for whom she made trading voyages between London and Holland, carrying mostly wool and cloth. In 1609 she was purchased or chartered by the Virginia Company as the flagship of the Virginia-bound fleet. Like other ships of her type, she had a high sterncastle and forecastle and a wide, well-rounded hull that allowed her to carry large amounts of cargo. Because of her short, chubby hull shape and high profile, the Sea Venture, like other vessels of this kind, had a tendency to wallow and roll alarmingly in high seas and was not well able to sail into the wind.
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Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
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She looked for Andrew but couldn’t find him. So she searched through the crowd of neighbors and hired help until she spotted Captain Winston walking toward her—with Andrew cradled in his arms. Alarm shot through her and she hurried toward them. “He’s fine,” the Captain whispered as they drew closer. “He just finally ran out of steam, that’s all. That, and he has a full belly. Five pieces of sausage, at least. And tenderloin and corn bread. This boy can eat.” Smiling, Aletta brushed back the hair from her son’s face and kissed him. He didn’t stir. “Thank you, Captain,” she said softly. “Are you feeling better? Tempy said you’d gone to lie down.” “I am. It was good to rest. Although I feel guilty for having napped while the rest of you were out here working.” “The rest of us don’t have your reason for being tired, Mrs. Prescott. Besides, I saw you up fixing breakfast long before the day even started.” She looked at him. “You saw me? Did you come by the kitchen and I missed you?” He opened his mouth as though to respond, then smiled. “Actually, no”—he glanced away—“I-I can see into the kitchen from the front window of my cabin. And when I woke up and looked out, I saw the light in the window, then spotted you standing there. I saw Tempy too, of course,” he added quickly. “Not only you.” His expression looked a little like that of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and the discovery put her at ease, for some reason. “Are you hungry?” He motioned to a table off to the side. “Roasted pork, fresh sausage, butter beans, and corn bread are ready to eat.” “I think I will, if you don’t mind holding him for a moment longer?” “Not at all. I’ve enjoyed his company today.
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Tamera Alexander (Christmas at Carnton (Carnton #0.5))
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His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31
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William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire)
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Because the authorities have forced all residents of Xinjiang to register for a new state-issued ID card, they have a base library of high-definition images of each person’s face, and in addition, they have collected tens of millions of images of the faces of residents who pass through the checkpoints. The Face++ and similar algorithms such as those from companies like YITU and Sensetime run extremely fast. As the Shawan study notes, in 0.8 seconds it can run a match of a face, and register and record notification alarms related to up to three hundred thousand targeted people.
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Darren Byler (In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony)
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Information Collecting The Deep State is a surveillance state. China is the surveillance capital of the world. Their citizens are monitored and traced with cameras using facial recognition as well as through their iPhones. Collecting and monitoring personal information in the United States includes data from your laptop camera and microphone. If you can see and speak to another person using an iPhone, then high-tech equipment can see, hear, and record you. Although denied, Siri can listen in not only when you say, “Hey Siri,” but as long as the small box is turned on. The camera and microphone on your home computer can be remotely accessed. Even certain types of alarm systems and certain infant security cameras can be hacked, enabling a person to see into your home. It is interesting that the CEOs of computer companies often place dark tape over their camera and microphone.
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Perry Stone (America's Apocalyptic Reset: Unmasking the Radical's Blueprints to Silence Christians, Patriots, and Conservatives)
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But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. In response, executives’ salaries skyrocketed. The trend was further “helped” by compensation consulting firms (scathingly dubbed “Ratchet, Ratchet, and Bingo” by the investor Warren Buffett) that advised their CEO clients to demand outrageous raises. The result? Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker—about three times the salary before executive compensation went public. Keeping that in mind, I had a few questions for the executive I met with. “What would happen,” I ventured, “if the information in your salary database became known throughout the company?” The executive looked at me with alarm. “We could get over a lot of things here—insider trading, financial scandals, and the like—but if everyone knew everyone else’s salary, it would be a true catastrophe. All but the highest-paid individual would feel underpaid—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they went out and looked for another job.” Isn’t this odd? It has been shown repeatedly that the link between amount of salary and happiness is not as strong as one would expect it to be
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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If only one of twelve pulls of the Andon Cord stops the assembly line for a genuine problem, you might think the company would be upset by wasting supervisors’ time chasing the eleven false alarms. It turns out that the opposite is true. A pulled Andon Cord that does not identify an actual error is framed as a useful drill. The false alarm is instead experienced as a valuable learning moment, a welcome education on how things go wrong and how to adjust so as to reduce that possibility. This is not a cultural nuance. It’s a practical approach. Every Andon Cord pull is seen as a valuable episode that in the long run saves time and promotes quality.
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Amy C. Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well)
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France is a perfect example. After investing $33 billion during the last decade to add more solar and wind to the grid,20 France now uses less nuclear and more natural gas than before, leading to higher electricity prices and more carbon-intensive electricity.21 Between 2016 and 2019, the five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Corporation, BP, and Total—invested
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Michael Shellenberger (Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All)
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ECCO took full advantage of the new technology. As a result, it had the lowest costs of the companies in its industry that aspired to be customer intimate; that is, the ones making lights and alarms that could be reconfigured for use in a broad range of products. It was also one of the most innovative. Eighty percent of its revenue in 2004 came from products that hadn’t existed eight years before—40 percent from brand-new products and 40 percent from products that had been improved. At any given time, moreover, the company had twenty product-development projects going, each of which could yield thirty or forty new part numbers (as the different configurations were known). In 2002 and 2003 alone, the development teams came up with 850 new part numbers, worth $9 million in revenue.
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Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big)
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Lucent, Not Transparent In mid-2000, Lucent Technologies Inc. was owned by more investors than any other U.S. stock. With a market capitalization of $192.9 billion, it was the 12th-most-valuable company in America. Was that giant valuation justified? Let’s look at some basics from Lucent’s financial report for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2000:1 FIGURE 17-1 Lucent Technologies Inc. All numbers in millions of dollars. * Other assets, which includes goodwill.
Source: Lucent quarterly financial reports (Form 10-Q). A closer reading of Lucent’s report sets alarm bells jangling like an unanswered telephone switchboard: Lucent had just bought an optical equipment supplier, Chromatis Networks, for $4.8 billion—of which $4.2 billion was “goodwill” (or cost above book value). Chromatis had 150 employees, no customers, and zero revenues, so the term “goodwill” seems inadequate; perhaps “hope chest” is more accurate. If Chromatis’s embryonic products did not work out, Lucent would have to reverse the goodwill and charge it off against future earnings. A footnote discloses that Lucent had lent $1.5 billion to purchasers of its products. Lucent was also on the hook for $350 million in guarantees for money its customers had borrowed elsewhere. The total of these “customer financings” had doubled in a year—suggesting that purchasers were running out of cash to buy Lucent’s products. What if they ran out of cash to pay their debts? Finally, Lucent treated the cost of developing new software as a “capital asset.” Rather than an asset, wasn’t that a routine business expense that should come out of earnings? CONCLUSION: In August 2001, Lucent shut down the Chromatis division after its products reportedly attracted only two customers.2 In fiscal year 2001, Lucent lost $16.2 billion; in fiscal year 2002, it lost another $11.9 billion. Included in those losses were $3.5 billion in “provisions for bad debts and customer financings,” $4.1 billion in “impairment charges related to goodwill,” and $362 million in charges “related to capitalized software.” Lucent’s stock, at $51.062 on June 30, 2000, finished 2002 at $1.26—a loss of nearly $190 billion in market value in two-and-a-half years.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Bilbo knew it. He had read of a good many things he had never seen or done. He was very much alarmed, as well as disgusted; he wished himself a hundred miles away, and yet—and yet somehow he could not go back to Thorin and Company emptyhanded. So he stood and hesitated in the shadows.
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J.R.R. Tolkien
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the alarm company came up checking all his doors and windows, but when he called the company, they said his alarm was fine and they didn’t send anyone out.
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Victor Methos (A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains, #1))
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The deal seemed favorable to Tanjong, especially given that its power-sale agreement with the Malaysian state would soon run out, handing the government leverage to achieve a bargain price. Lazard believed the whole deal smelled of political corruption. It was common in Malaysia for the government to award sweetheart deals to companies in return for kickbacks and political financing; that was what Lazard thought was going on, and so it pulled out. With no other choice, Goldman instead became an adviser to 1MDB on the purchase, as well as helping the fund raise the capital. The bank provided a valuation range that justified 1MDB paying $2.7 billion for the plants. Leissner was at his most charming as he tried to cajole members of 1MDB’s board of directors to accept Goldman’s terms for selling the bonds. Sitting opposite the Goldman banker in a room at the fund’s downtown Kuala Lumpur offices, just a few weeks after Leissner’s meeting in Abu Dhabi, some of the board members looked skeptical. Goldman was preparing to launch what it internally dubbed Project Magnolia, a plan to sell $1.75 billion in ten-year bonds for the 1MDB fund. But some board members were alarmed by what Leissner had informed them: Goldman would likely make $190 million from its part in the deal, or 11 percent of the bond’s value. This was an outrageous sum, even more than Goldman had made on the Sarawak transaction the year before, and way above the normal fee of $1 million for such work. The banker defended Goldman’s profit by pointing out that 1MDB would make big returns in a future IPO of the power assets, all without putting down any money of its own. “Look at your number, not at our number,” he said cajolingly.
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Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
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Dr. Al Rosen. He is a former accounting professor, one of the most reputable forensic accountants in North America. Dr. Rosen has consulted or given independent opinions on over 1,000 litigation-related engagements. In recent years he has written two books, which have sounded alarm bells about the state of the accounting profession, but the profession makes more money by not heeding his warnings. What concerns him should concern us all. His first book was titled “Swindlers” and went into detail about how easy it is to financially dupe investors in Canada and the U.S. His book gave examples from cases he has handled in his career. His second book “Easy Prey Investors” is also a must read for anyone investing in Canada or the U.S. In it he reveals the tricks and traps of the accounting industry that no others in the industry have the courage or the moral freedom to voice. The story below, from the UK, gives a snapshot and a link to the kind of accounting fraud that Dr. Al Rosen has long been warning us about. January 15, 2018 On Monday, Carillion, the U.K.’s second-largest construction company, announced that it would go into compulsory liquidation. Carillion is a construction company, it also provides facilities management and maintenance services such as cleaning and catering in the U.K.’s National Health Service hospitals, providing meals in 900 schools, and maintaining prisons. It holds a number of government contracts, including for the construction of a high-speed rail link and for the maintenance of roads. 43,000 employees worldwide, 20,000 work in the U.K.; the company also has a significant presence in the
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Larry Elford (Farming Humans: Easy Money (Non Fiction Financial Murder Book 1))
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Imagine if we had our entire criminal code and regulatory structure, but no Constitution. Every institution, whether it’s a country or a company, needs a charter of first principles that are everlasting—not just a hodgepodge and mishmash of bureaucratic rules and requirements that can be ignored with little or no consequence. Getting people to listen and report and sound alarms and seek advice requires more than email reminders; it entails understanding what motivates real people in real life, people with vulnerabilities and fears and biases and every other ordinary human failing and foible that can prevent us from doing the right thing.
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Preet Bharara (Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law)
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When he sees an email from an unhappy customer, he forwards it to the appropriate executive with a simple “?” This sets off an alarm bell in the mind of the poor soul receiving the message, a Pavlovian response that makes that person drop everything and solve that problem for the customer—now.
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Brian Dumaine (Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It)
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Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Affection comes from the company of people, misery comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
The old bamboo is entangled, the young shoot is unattached, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
A deer goes to eat where it wants to eat, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Give up your children and your wives and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Everyone wants your attention, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
A bird who has torn the net, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Fire does not return to what it has burnt, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
A tiger is not alarmed by sounds in the forest, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
With eyes cast down, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
At home anywhere, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
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Eliot Weinberger (An Elemental Thing)
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He was a tall, burly, youngish man in plain clothes whose features some freak of heredity had assembled into a perpetual expression of muted alarm, so that to be in his company was like consorting with a man dogged by assassins.
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Edmund Crispin (Love Lies Bleeding (The Gervase Fen Mysteries))
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China’s actions also have major personal-security implications in the digital age. Consider the recent Chinese corporate acquisition of the gay dating site Grindr, which is headquartered in Los Angeles.30 The purchaser was a little-known Chinese online gaming firm called Kunlun, which is not a state company, and Grindr has assured its users that their data will be safe. But some cybersecurity experts have rung alarm bells about the possibility that Beijing could gain broad access to user data. Grindr often serves to facilitate discreet gay hookups, making it “a tantalizing source of information” for Chinese intelligence agencies, which, as one report noted, are building “massive databases” on individual Americans “to have handy” and perhaps use “as leverage in blackmail scenarios.
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Larry Diamond (Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency)
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Cable companies still have a direct pipe into our living room, as well as huge infrastructures and employee bases (Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner employ more than two hundred thousand people). Smarter usage-based billing and cloud-based updates will make their video content services more responsive and valuable. They also have the opportunity to become the operating system of connected homes. In a few years we could be using our former “cable company” to upgrade an alarm service, schedule a new refrigerator installation, or discover we have some loose shingles on our roof.
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Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
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In the brain’s architecture, the amygdala is poised something like an alarm company where operators stand ready to send out emergency calls to the fire department, police, and a neighbor whenever a home security system signals trouble.
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Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
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The death fat is that fat tire inside, the IAF. Why? In 1970, a Big Food scientist at a company under the New Jersey Turnpike found the ‘bliss point’ for humans, the perfect combo of refined sugar, salt, and fat that was optimally addictive to humans—junk food. The reason you die from eating at the bliss point is that the inside fat tire grows and grows and provokes inflammation in the body, and that sounds the alarm for the immune system to rush at it all the time, but it keeps on growing and growing until at a critical moment it outgrows the blood supply and the bloodless fat cells die—really quickly die—and this attracts the macrophages, which migrate to the abdominal fat and eat up the dead cells and kind of circle the wagons.
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Samuel Shem (Man's 4th Best Hospital)
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When a determined thief scouts a home, he can use an online search to check an alarm system for flaws and known issues. How does this thief know the name of the company? The homeowner posted a big sign in the yard giving him all the information he needed to plan his attack. Don’t give away vital information like this to potential thieves.
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Andy Murphy (Home Security: The Secure Dad's Guide: Easy Home Defense Techniques to Keep Your Family Safe)
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Top Line Tint and Wraps is your one-stop shop for all your automotive customization & protection needs. We are the premier window tinting, vehicle wraps, paint protection film (PPF), ceramic coating, and car audio, car alarm, and car electronics company in the Fort Myers area. Protect and enhance the appearance of your vehicle with our premium installation services. Our expert installers are professionally trained in the latest tools and techniques to deliver a superior installation experience.
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Top Line Tint and Wraps
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That very month, at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, two young patients experienced strange and alarming symptoms. As they underwent dialysis, a lifesaving procedure to filter blood for those whose kidneys don’t work properly, the patients’ eyes started swelling, their heart rates escalated, and their blood pressure dropped. These were signs of a life-threatening allergic reaction. Dr. Anne Beck, the director of the nephrology unit, directed her staff to wash out the tubing with extra fluid before hooking the children back up to the dialysis machines. For the next two months, everything seemed fine. But in January 2008, the symptoms struck again. Beck contacted an epidemiologist specializing in children’s infectious diseases who immediately assembled a command center where a team worked around the clock to uncover the cause of the strange reactions. But as more children succumbed and the staff grew frightened, the epidemiologist notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC immediately contacted dialysis centers in other states and learned of similar reactions elsewhere. As the CDC and the FDA began a joint investigation, their efforts pointed to a common denominator: all the sickened patients had been given heparin made by the brand-name company Baxter, the nation’s biggest heparin supplier. It was a drug that patients took intravenously during dialysis to ensure that they didn’t suffer blood clots. Within weeks, Baxter—at the FDA’s urging—began a sweeping series of recalls, until finally the allergic reactions stopped. Yet
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Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
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The fact that drug companies embrace
and fund this new psychiatry is cause enough for alarm. Equally telling is a similar embrace by the managed care industry, which obviously likes its quick-fix approach and simplistic approach to complicated clinical problems.
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David Kaiser, MD
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Understanding the Importance of an Oil Temperature Indicator in Transformers
Transformers are integral components of electrical distribution systems, stepping up or stepping down voltage levels to ensure the proper functioning of power grids and electrical equipment. However, like all electrical equipment, transformers are susceptible to overheating, which can lead to serious operational failures or even catastrophic damage. This is where an oil temperature indicator becomes a critical component in the maintenance and monitoring of transformer health.
Transformers typically rely on oil for both insulation and cooling. The oil serves to insulate the internal electrical components, preventing electrical faults and providing a medium for heat dissipation. As transformers are subjected to high electrical loads, the oil absorbs the excess heat generated. If this heat isn’t managed properly, it can lead to an increase in the transformer’s operating temperature, which may degrade the oil's insulating properties, or worse, cause permanent damage to the transformer’s internal components. Hence, monitoring the oil temperature is vital for ensuring safe and reliable transformer operation.
The Role of Oil Temperature Indicators
An oil temperature indicator is a device used to measure the temperature of the insulating oil inside a transformer. By providing real-time readings, these indicators help operators monitor whether the transformer is operating within its safe temperature range. Most transformers are designed to operate within a specified temperature range, typically between 50°C to 85°C. Exceeding these temperatures can lead to the deterioration of the oil and the insulation materials, which could compromise the transformer’s performance and lifespan. At Precimeasure, we have three types of Temperature measurement products such as Dial type, Bimetallic, and Digital.
Preventing Overheating
Overheating in transformers is a leading cause of premature failure. Without proper monitoring, excessive temperature rise may go unnoticed, leading to severe damage. An oil temperature indicator allows operators to identify potential issues before they become critical. If the oil temperature begins to rise beyond acceptable limits, operators can take corrective action, such as reducing the transformer’s load, improving ventilation, or activating cooling systems. In some cases, continuous monitoring with automatic alarms can alert maintenance personnel to potential problems even before they are visible to the naked eye.
Enhancing Transformer Lifespan
Transformers are expensive, long-term investments. Therefore, preserving their lifespan is of utmost importance for both utility companies and industries. By monitoring the oil temperature, the risk of thermal aging is minimized. Continuous high temperatures can break down the oil’s chemical structure, reducing its dielectric strength and increasing the likelihood of transformer failure. Regular monitoring helps ensure that the transformer operates within safe thermal limits, thus extending its useful life and reducing the likelihood of costly repairs or replacements. At Precimeasure, we curate products that ensures the durability of transformers.
Preventing Oil Breakdown
Oil breakdown is a significant concern for transformers. When the temperature rises beyond recommended levels, it accelerates the breakdown of transformer oil, which can lead to a loss of its insulating and cooling properties. This breakdown can cause internal short circuits, fires, or even explosions in extreme cases. The oil temperature indicator serves as an early warning system, alerting personnel to potential overheating before it leads to such dangerous consequences.
Conclusion
An oil temperature indicator is not just a convenient tool but a crucial safeguard for transformer operation.
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oil temperature indicator
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The findings were—and still are today—alarming. Based on the USTR report and research on technology transfers and intellectual property, Trump further restricted Chinese access to investment in the high-tech sector. In response, China retaliated with its own tariffs, and accused the United States government both of triggering the trade war and trying to slow China’s growth. This makes the continuation of the decoupling policy during Joe Biden’s administration all the more surprising. United States rhetoric and diplomacy have become milder and more authoritative, but their strategic substance in this area is strikingly similar to Biden’s predecessor: Punitive tariffs against China have remained almost unchanged. Biden even stepped up the pace slightly by compiling a blacklist of sixty Chinese companies in 2020—which he has continuously updated since then—that United States firms may no longer do business with. Shortly afterward, the United States joined the EU, Canada, and the UK in imposing sanctions on Chinese officials in connection with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States called on China to condemn the attack. China in turn blamed the United States for the war. A few weeks later, in May 2022, Chinese authorities and state-affiliated companies were told to replace American-made computers with domestic brands. Around fifty million computers were affected.
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Mathias Döpfner (Dealings with Dictators: A CEO's Guide to Defending Democracy)
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**Understanding the Importance of Oil temperature indicators **
The oil's temperature is one of the most important things to keep an eye on in the world of machinery and motors. Oil temperature indicators play a crucial role in this situation. The purpose of these instruments is to provide data on the oil temperature in real time, ensuring that machines operate within safe limits. These indicators are invaluable in a variety of industrial applications because overheating can result in catastrophic failures, compromised performance, and costly downtime. In mechanical systems, oil serves multiple purposes. It dissipates heat generated during operation, lubricates moving parts, and reduces wear and tear. However, oil can lose its effectiveness if it is heated beyond its ideal temperature range. Most of the time, this causes more wear and friction, which could lead to severe engine damage or failure. As a result, oil temperature indicators are very important tools for any operator or maintenance technician who wants to avoid overheating and the costs that come with it. A display unit, either analog or digital, and a sensor that measures the oil temperature are typically the components of an oil temperature indicator. It is possible to take immediate corrective action when temperatures reach unsafe levels thanks to advanced features like alarms found in many modern indicators. Depending on the application, oil temperature indicators may require different construction and installation methods. These indicators, for instance, need to be durable and able to withstand extreme conditions in high-performance engines. In a similar vein, efficient and long-lasting industrial machinery like turbines, compressors, and hydraulic systems require accurate temperature monitoring. Choosing the right type of oil temperature indicator for a particular application involves considering several factors, including the temperature range, the environment, and the type of oil used.
Oil temperature indicators on a regular basis has the potential to significantly improve reliability and performance in industries like manufacturing, construction, and transportation that rely on machinery that runs continuously. By investing in quality oil temperature indicators and utilizing them effectively, companies can avert dangerous overheating scenarios. The readings of the indicators can be used to carry out routine maintenance, ensuring that the equipment runs smoothly and effectively. Oil temperature indicators can provide insight into the overall health of a mechanical system in addition to preventing overheating. Temperature swings that are out of the ordinary may indicate deeper issues that need to be addressed before they become more serious issues. For example, an unexpected rise in oil temperature could indicate a failing pump, an obstruction in the system, or that the oil has degraded and needs replacing.
By effectively utilizing oil temperature indicators, operators and maintenance personnel can stay one step ahead of the competition. Regular training sessions on interpreting temperature data, understanding the warning signs, and implementing preventive measures can lead to safer and more efficient operations.
In conclusion, Oil temperature indicators are not just accessories but essential tools for monitoring and managing the health of machinery and motors. They aid in the prevention of overheating, extend the service life of equipment, and ultimately save businesses money and time by providing crucial information about oil temperature. The significance of these indicators in preserving optimal performance cannot be overstated as machinery continues to evolve and operate under more demanding conditions.
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Oil temperature indicators