Authority Zero Quotes

If you voted for a man who said "Grab em by the pussy," you have zero room to claim to protect anyone in bathrooms.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

There are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what someone else eats, they cannot eat. Bakers do not believe that the world is a zero-sum game because they can bake more and bigger pies.

Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.

A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.

I had authority issues. In my defense, my math teacher had it coming. She’d made me write one hundred on the black board, so I wrote one, zero, zero in words since one hundred consisted of those numbers. Because she hadn't been specific in her instructions,she’d berated me for being a smart aleck. The whole class had laughed at me. The next morning, they had to cut her out of her chair.

We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense of investment and a pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

Then Poor Tony’s body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

For after all, what is man in creation? Is he not a mere cipher compared with the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a mean between zero & all, infinitely remote from understanding of either extreme? Who can follow these astonishing processes? The Author of these wonders understands them, but no one else can.

God never promised we wouldn’t know pain. He isn’t the author of it, but He isn’t the bodyguard blocking it from us, either. Jesus Himself knew intense, agonizing pain. The worst kind, as a matter of fact. Betrayal. False accusations. A humiliating death on a cross for a crime He didn’t commit. No, God never promised us we wouldn’t know pain. That we wouldn’t know Ground Zero moments and dark nights of the soul. What He DID promise was to be with us in the midst of our pain.

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I’m not feeling it. I believe in God even when he is silent. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Author Elizabeth Stone once said, “Making a decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

The distance between you and your destination can be set to zero only by your courage to act and by your determination to sustain this action till the end!

Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less you have.

If the Society understands me as Zero, then they should also know the meaning of zero.

When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist. Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less you have.

atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

He didn’t like how his character was written into the story but he refused to acknowledge that the character was a carbon copy of himself. So he rated the book a zero and that’s ok- because the author rated him a zero also.

Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.

Taking wildly different positions on the value of assets and using his emotional state to justify those valuations helps explain something else Trump has done repeatedly. Congress requires all presidential candidates to file a financial disclosure statement listing their assets, liabilities, and income. Trump’s ninety-two-page disclosure report valued one of his best-known properties at more than $50 million. But he told tax authorities the same property was worth only about $1 million. He valued another signature Trump property at zero—and demanded the return of the property taxes he had already paid.

Right now there are some fifteen thousand scientists authorized to work with deadly pathogens, but there are zero federal agencies charged with assessing the risks of all of these labs, let alone even keeping track of their number. As a consequence, there’ve been countless reports of mishandling of contagious pathogens, of vials gone missing, of poor records.

They have zero authority compared to Jesus. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t the authority Jesus possessed that made him a great leader. It was his influence over the minds and hearts of people, influence cultivated by speaking truth and challenging the status quo, by serving others, by healing people and meeting their needs. It was an influence cultivated by giving people hope and vision for the future.

An effective content strategy has to mix your authenticity, your story & your authority mixed with the shares of other peoples content. If you're only sharing other peoples stories, authority, authenticity & brands, how does that make any new or old visitors want to connect with yours? And, only reposting without sharing why you chose to share it & what your thoughts are on that content creates zero connection to you and for you.

Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don’t have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge accumulates, so it can increase. Scientists and engineers know this, but artists, authors, and philosophers keep trying to start over from ground zero in the humanities. Thus, they don’t really progress—they become primitive.

And “the government”—well, Red had zero confidence that the government would be able to do anything. Not because it was full of bad people or there was a giant conspiracy or anything like that. Her belief came from the fact that she could read and think and knew that the departments that address pandemics were underfunded and unprepared for the scope of the problem. She also knew that while the wheels of governing ground exceedingly fine, they were also slow as hell. By the time funding was authorized it would be too late. And it was.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom.

A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break, lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both

In a 2011 TED Talk in San Francisco, author and speaker Mel Robbins talked about how the chances that you are you are about 1 in 400 trillion. (Yes, that’s a four hundred followed by twelve zeros.) This takes into account the chance of your parents meeting out of all the people on the planet, the chance of them reproducing, the chance of you being born at the exact moment that you were, and every other wildly improbable factor that goes into each individual person. The whole point of her crazy calculation was that we should take the sheer improbability of our own existence as a kick in the butt to get out of bed in the morning.

For my own daughter to serve something like this... I'm at a loss. It is so far from the correct answer that is positively deplorable. This is a contaminated ruin. Goodness. I'd been so looking forward to tasting my precious daughter's cooking... but not if it's this. Just looking at it, I can tell it's worth no higher a score than zero. My appetite hasn't been stirred in the least." "Oh my! Cooking is meant to be judged on taste... ... but you were able to judge on mere appearance alone? Incredible! I expected no less of you, Father. However... should the two chefs who embody your personal ideal of correct cooking taste this... ... and decide that it is indeed delicious... ... then would you not think it necessary to reevaluate your decision?

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time. Bacon is also an acceptable restorative.

Partly at Rubel’s urging, Secretary of Defense McNamara later compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters. Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. According to Blair, McNamara responded, “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” “What he had just learned from me,” Blair continues, was that the locks had been installed,52 but everyone knew the combination. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.

Many and various are the New York tales that are told of professor Sidney Morgenbesser. During a conference of linguistic philosophers at Columbia University, he interrupted the pompous J. L. Austin, who was saying that while many double negatives express a positive—as in “not unattractive”—there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative. Morgenbesser’s interjection took the form of the two words “Yeah, yeah.” Or it could have been “Yeah, right.” On another occasion, he put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the subway steps. A policeman approached and told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser explained—pointed out might be a better term—that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and had not yet lit up. The cop repeated his injunction. Morgenbesser reiterated his observation. After a few such exchanges, the cop saw he was beaten and fell back on the oldest standby of enfeebled authority: “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” To this the old philosopher replied, “Who do you think you are—Kant?” His last word was misconstrued, and the whole question of the categorical imperative had to be hashed out down at the precinct house. Morgenbesser walked. That, in my opinion, is the way that New York is supposed to be. Irony and a bit of sass, combined with a pugnacious independence, should always stand a chance against bovine officials who have barely learned to memorize such demanding mantras as “zero tolerance” and “no exceptions.” Today, the professor would be stopped, insulted, ticketed, and told that if he didn’t like it he could waste a day in court, or several days dealing with the bureaucracy, or both.

Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code. As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project to increase productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving productivity further toward zero. Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. Management does not want to expend resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually, they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky. A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it’s a green-field project. They get to start over and create something wonderful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system. Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does. This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.

IN JANUARY 1959 Police Chief Herbert Jenkins found a poem tacked to a bulletin board at his departmental headquarters. Tellingly, the anonymous author had titled it “The Plan of Improvement,” in sarcastic tribute to Mayor Hartsfield’s 1952 program for the city’s expansion and economic progress. The poem looked back over a decade of racial change and spoke volumes about the rising tide of white resentment. It began with a brief review of the origins of residential transition and quickly linked the desegregation of working-class neighborhoods to the desegregation of the public spaces surrounding them: Look my children and you shall see, The Plan of Improvement by William B. On a great civic venture we’re about to embark And we’ll start this one off at old Mozeley Park. White folks won’t mind losing homes they hold dear; (If it doesn’t take place on an election year) Before they have time to get over the shock, We’ll have that whole section—every square block. I’ll try something different for plan number two This time the city’s golf courses will do. They’ll mix in the Club House and then on the green I might get a write up in Life Magazine. And now comes the schools for plan number three To mix them in classrooms just fills me with glee; For I have a Grandson who someday I pray Will thank me for sending this culture his way. And for my finale, to do it up right, The buses, theatres and night spots so bright; Pools and restaurants will be mixed up at last And my Plan of Improvement will be going full blast. The sarcasm in the poem is unmistakable, of course, but so are the ways in which the author—either a policeman himself or a friend of one—clearly linked the city’s pursuit of “progress” with a litany of white losses. In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

Jenna is acting strange. Weeping, moping, even remarks tending toward belittlement Melmoth might tolerate (although he cannot think why; she is not his wife and even in human females PMS is a plague of the past) but when he caught her lying about Raquel—udderly wonderful, indeed—he knew the problem was serious. After sex, Melmoth powers her down. He retrieves her capsule from underground storage, a little abashed to be riding up with the oblong vessel in a lobby elevator where anyone might see. Locked vertical for easy transport, the capsule on its castors and titanium carriage stands higher than Melmoth is tall. He cannot help feeling that its translucent pink upper half and tapered conical roundness make it look like an erect penis. Arriving at penthouse level, he wheels it into his apartment. Once inside his private quarters, he positions it beside the hoverbed and enters a six-character alphanumeric open-sesame to spring the lid. On an interior panel, Melmoth touches a sensor for AutoRenew. Gold wands deploy from opposite ends and set up a zero-gravity field that levitates Jenna from the topsheet. As if by magic—to Melmoth it is magic—the inert form of his personal android companion floats four feet laterally and gentles to rest in a polymer cradle contoured to her default figure. Jenna is only a SmartBot. She does not breathe, blood does not run in her arteries and veins. She has no arteries or veins, nor a heart, nor anything in the way of organic tissue. She can be replaced in a day—she can be replaced right now. If Melmoth touches “Upgrade,” the capsule lid will seal and lock, all VirtuLinks to Jenna will break, and a courier from GlobalDigital will collect the unit from a cargo bay of Melmoth’s high-rise after delivering a new model to Melmoth himself. It distresses him, how easy replacement would be, as if Jenna were no more abiding than an oldentime car he might decide one morning to trade-in. Seeing her in the capsule is bad enough; the poor thing looks as if she is lying in her coffin. Melmoth does not select “Power Down” on his cerebral menu any more often than he must. Only to update her software does Melmoth resort to pulling Jenna’s plug. Updating, too, disturbs him. In authorizing it, he cannot pretend she is human. [pp. 90-91]

With a zero risk profile, no one dares to take responsibility. Mistakes are hidden like dust is swept under the carpet and when they come to light, innocent people who had nothing to do with the mistakes are let go, while the responsible people stay in their positions. Company leaders understand the zero risk profile and rule with authority. People not wanting to risk their income, do unpaid overtime. Though this is illegal, the lack of “Western” ethics does neither shock nor surprise any of the employees. People complaining are creatively fired. Most employees keep their mouths shut and know other companies apply the exact same methods. It merely is business as usual. This demotivates the masses and – consequently - service levels become progressively worse. With the strong company hierarchies and the many levels of middle management, information from the lowest levels in the company hardly reaches general management and vice versa. Underutilized resources, like the employees, generate - relatively seen – little added value. Salaries are in line with these values and people just accept it. Regardless of their age or background, they know their friends and family members earn a similar low salary elsewhere. It is what it is, right?

Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.” 34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.

The study demonstrated that the IQ scores or academic achievement of students while enrolled in school had between zero and 5 percent predictive power in explaining the variation in their long-term outcomes. At the same time, emotional and attitudinal success attributes (the authors named six: self-awareness, perseverance, proactivity, emotional stability, goal setting, and social support systems) explained 49 to 75 percent of the variance in the students’ long-term outcomes. Put another way, academic achievement and IQ score predicted next to nothing about the future of these dyslexic students. What mattered most was their ability to bounce back, get help from others, and take action.

In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics: Demanding but able to be satisfied. Effective leaders get people to make realistic commitments and then hold them responsible for achieving results. But if you’re never satisfied, you’ll sap people’s motivation. Know when to celebrate success and when to push for more. Accessible but not too familiar. Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority. Decisive but judicious. New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge, perhaps by rapidly making some low-consequence decisions, without jumping too quickly into decisions that they aren’t ready to make. Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer some decisions until you know enough to make the right calls. Focused but flexible. Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input. They also know when to give people the flexibility to achieve results in their own ways. Active without causing commotion. There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout. Learn to pay attention to stress levels and pace yourself and others. Willing to make tough calls but humane. You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting go of marginal performers. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve people’s dignity and that others perceive as fair.

As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process—understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.

An agent is a combination of data known about the actors in a request. This typically consists of a user (also known as the subject), a device (an asset used by the subject to make the request), and an application (web app, mobile app, API endpoint, etc.). Traditionally, these entities have been authorized separately, but zero trust networks recognize that policy is best captured as a combination of all participants in a request. By authorizing the entire context of a request, the impact of credential theft is greatly mitigated.

The second step in the full comprehension of the idea of zero took place with Brahmagupta, author of the Sindhind that would find its way to Abbasid Baghdad. He made it his job to continue and correct the work of Aryabhata about one hundred years after the latter’s death. Brahmagupta was to treat the zero symbol as a number just like the other nine, rather than merely as a void or an absence.33 This meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine.

It's all well and good that Joe Biden is now lecturing us that 'the worst sin of all is the abuse of power,' but where the hell was he—and where were you—for the past eight years, when the president was starting wars without Congressional authorization, passing major legislation with zero votes from the opposing party, and ruling almost exclusively through executive orders and actions? Mostly exhorting Obama to act 'unilaterally' and 'without Congress' on terrorism, immigration, guns, and whatever because you couldn't dream of a day when an unrestrained billionaire reality-TV celebrity would wield those same powers toward very different ends.

She remembers that American airplanes had dropped handbills a few days before the bombing warning Hiroshima residents to evacuate because “something terrible” was going to happen to the city. But, she says, the population was forbidden by law from reading the handbills, which were scooped up by the authorities.

Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers.

Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers. The tiny hairs on my arm stand up on end. I swiftly render her words into English: “He’s going to kill me.” Not missing a beat, the dispatcher asks, “Where is he now?” “Outside. I saw him through the window,” I state, after listening to the Spanish version. I’m trying to stay calm and focused, but the fear in the caller’s voice is not only contagious, but essential to the meaning I have to convey. For what seems like an eternity (but is probably just a few seconds), I hear only the beeps of the recorded line and the dispatcher clicking away at his keyboard. I feel impatient. He’s most likely looking to see how far the nearest police officer is from the scene. “Interpreter, find out where she is.

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist. In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter. 'Controversy' therefore structurally undesirable. After all, it would require a redistribution of power. The pyramid is especially interested in promoting mediocre types that promote safe and boring life visions, because then one ever needs to fear for his position, which, in case of serious controversy, they'd be forced to defend. Ergo, 100 interviews with Maria Barnas, and zero with Martinus Benders.

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

Lizabeth Cohen defines the postwar equation of citizenship and consumerism as the emergence of a "consumer's republic" in which consumerism, rather than social policy, is seen as the means through which to achieve social ideals. In the contemporary context, government authorities speak to Americans in the language of consumerism more than the language of citizenship, inciting us everyday to do our part for the national economy by spending our money, buying cars and houses, and accumulating debt on credit card. Indeed, Americans are almost always spoken to as citizen-consumers.

In the first place, Coase specified three crucial conditions for his conclusion to hold. These were: a legal framework establishing liability for actions, presumably supported by governmental authority; perfect information; and zero transaction costs (including organization costs and the costs of making side-payments). It is absolutely clear that none of these conditions is met in world politics. World government does not exist, making property rights and rules of legal liability fragile; information is extremely costly and often held unequally by different actors; transaction costs, including costs of organization and side-payments, are often very high. Thus an inversion of the Coase theorem would seem more appropriate to our subject. In the absence of the conditions that Coase specified, coordination will often be thwarted by dilemmas of collective action.

Retention is the most critical metric in understanding a product, but most of the time, the data is not pretty. When you look at the engagement data for the entire industry, the data has told the same story over and over—users don’t stick to their apps. One study50 published on tech blog TechCrunch told the story in its headline: “Nearly 1 in 4 people abandon mobile apps after only one use.” The authors looked at data from 37,000 users to show that a large percentage of users would quit an app after just a single try. Unfortunately, I’ve found similar results. In collaboration with Ankit Jain, a former product manager at Google Play, I published an essay titled “Losing 80% of mobile users is normal,” which illustrated the rapid decay that happens right after a new user signs up to a product. Of the users who install an app, 70 percent of them aren’t active the next day, and by the first three months, 96 percent of users are no longer active. The shape of the retention curve matters a lot—ideally, the curve levels out over time, indicating that some users consistently come back. But this is not true for the average app—its curve consistently falls over time, eventually whittling itself to zero. The brutal conclusion is that the usual result for most apps is failure—but there are, of course, exceptions. This is why out of the 5+ million apps on iOS and Android, just a few hundred have large audiences, and only a few dozen dominate all of people’s time and attention. Data from analytics company comScore, revealed that people spend 80 percent with just three apps51—and I’m sure you can guess which ones.

It was hard, the authors said, to put a cost on the damage that gambling causes, but politicians needed to recognise that there was a trade-off. If you allowed gambling in order to raise revenue, you were causing damage to people’s lives by doing so and ultimately undermining society. Unlike insurance or other productive financial services, this is a zero sum industry: bookies’ profits are simply gamblers’ losses, and there is no broader societal benefit.

i.e. to disprove specialness or make a new model, a generational model that got away from it – but I also wanted to be special for making the meme. I wanted zero authorship and to be the one true author, all at the same time.

First they told me: “build a following and the industry will follow.” So I spent my entire 20s building a following on zero budget, getting by on donations. Then they told me: “You need a literary agent. But a literary agent wants to see you have a following and something big going on.” So I started my own small press and self published 5 books and spent day and night connecting with my people until I’d sold over 35,000 copies in 35 different countries and now they tell me: “no agent wants to work with a self published author.” Sometimes I feel like I was doomed from the very start, the very day I sat my food on that plane to London 12 years ago. Like the whole world keeps saying “you can fight all you want but we won’t let you in.” But I do have freedom and I do have my following and I have vulnerable souls writing to me on Friday nights, about loss and hope and how my books or music or words played a small part in something they went through and sometimes I think I would throw all that away just to have a literary agent and a management and the contracts and headlines… because I’m tired.. of always fighting uphill.. but then I get that message, on a Monday night, and I take my computer to a bar close to where I live in Berlin, high above the city, and I write like never before because I have my people and vulnerable souls to find and I have so many books in me and time is not endless, time is crucial, and lately I’ve felt it running out, some nights, so I’m writing another book that won’t be noticed by the agents but I have my people and that’s all I will care about from now on. My people and my freedom, with time running out. That’s what I will focus on.

Why invest in Stocks? Answer: 1) You can ‘own’ multiple businesses 2) Working hours are defined 3) No retirement age 4) Work from Anywhere 5) No organisation required 6) Fully scaleable - can buy 1 or 1 million shares at the same price 7) Quickest Liquidity 8) You can ‘bunk your ‘business days’ at your will, for as long as you wish, and get back as conveniently 9) All the ‘compliances’ headache is minus 10) Payments headaches are Zero. 11) Can make money on both side. 12) Get to know ‘Like Minded’ people without meeting them. 13) The kick of ‘identifying’ some businesses ahead of ‘The Aces’ is impeccably fulfilling.

Question upon question piling up, especially for readers of Paolo Rumor’s book. The author places the beginning of our traceable history, or at least our presumable history, in a kind of Year Zero. This Secret History would have been controlled, in an eminently discreet fashion, by this phantom “entity”, which, after having created dynastic empires and great civilizations, would also be behind the creation of none other than current modernity, including the European Union.

Across the globe I am often referred to as "the Indian neuroscientist" or "the Indian Author", despite the fact that my work is practically nonexistent in India, statistically speaking. Considering that, 90% of my book sales come from US, UK and Canada, the rest 10% from Europe, Mexico, South America and Australia, and zero from India - for transparency and context purposes I'll tell to you one more time - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Scientist - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Poet - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Philosopher. However, it's never about the sales, it's about the love. I only mention the demographics to put things in perspective. For example, there are many countries where people cannot afford to buy my books, since they are expensively exported from US and Europe, and yet, I receive far more love from these countries than the land I was born in. Philippines and Pakistan to name a few. As a matter of fact, hate wise speaking, Philippines is the only country so far, where I have not faced any hate and bigotry - which only goes to prove that, state of a currency does not reflect the broadness of heart. That's why, a substantial portion of my work is available freely on the internet. The point is - I am no more Indian, than I am a Yank or Canadian or Mexican or Turk or Swede or Pinoy or British or Brazilian or Egyptian or Aussie. Passport is just a glorified bus pass - nothing more. So, I repeat - I am an Earth Scientist - remember that. Nationalization of Naskar is desecration of Naskar.

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be “the completest revolution of all.” The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

The Ten Commandments of Punk Thou shalt know everything by the time thou art seventeen, with a great and sure certainty. Thou shalt proclaim the year zero and not honor the past because the new alone shall count. Thou shalt wear a garb of torn leather jacket and trousers, with accessories bearing a hint of S&M, with thy feet shod by Doc Martens. Thy T-shirt, like thy lyrics, will bear a slogan to offend. Thou shalt be bored, angry, pretty vacant, or at least faintly pissed off. Thou shalt have no more heroes, nor accept anyone in authority. Thou shalt bear an adjective for a surname like Rotten or Vicious. Thou shalt connect with thy audience so that they may invade thy stage or receive thy spit in their eye. Let them mosh. Thou shalt speak the truth in a fake cockney accent, even if thou art Irish or went to a minor English public school. Thou shalt not grow old lest thy come to realize the biggest authority thy will need to defeat is thine own self.

Comparison -He continued: Comparison exists in everything material and immaterial, when you stand in front of the library shelf to buy a book on a subject, you look at the author’s name first, to compare the quality of his presentation with the fame of his writer. When you enter a café, you look at the people in it, associating its importance with the importance of the customers, their looks, their clothing brand, and their watches. I know a café in Vienna, that you are not allowed to enter unless you wear specific clothing brands, and its prices are very high, although the coffee in it tastes bad, yet everyone sees it as an excellent coffee. These two papers are of the same color, you will not see them, not because they do not reflect light, or because they are colorless, but because there is no frame of reference on which the mind can rely to distinguish between them. He bent the little one to stick out its tip: but now, you have another frame of reference, this bend exposed it. Just because you see something when you do not have a proper frame of reference to base it on does not mean it does not exist. He smiled and looked him straight in the eye: just as you did not see that Roman worker on the bridge, it does not mean he does not exist.

-Have you ever thought about determinism? He continued and did not wait to hear the answer: In the past, humans believed that the eye sends a ray of light to bodies and sees them, then the Arab scholar Ibn Al-Haytham asked a logical question: If my eyes send a ray of light, why do I not see in the dark? Then he discovered that the eye is blind in its origin, a receiver and not a transmitter, it only sees when the light is reflected from the objects, so it picks up its reflection and does not send it. We understand determinism as we understand the sense of sight today, we receive it and do not send it, so we see that we are the subject and the deterministic object, we have no power before it, we have to receive it and submit to it, but what if our understanding of it is wrong?! As our understanding of the sense of sight was, while we think we receive determinism, we are in fact sending it. What if determinism had no existence, no reflection, and we were not designed to receive it but rather designed to make and transmit it. The general interpretation of determinism, on which all Muslims and non-Muslims agree, is that every event in the universe, including man’s perception and actions, is subject to a logical sequence of causes within a single continuum. Muslims say that God’s decree and predestination are pre-written and cannot be changed, but they struggle with the eternal question, if this was written for me in advance, then why would God punish me for something that I cannot change? Where is the justice in here! While unbelievers say it was nature, the laws of the universe, that created determinism, and they run into the zero-cause barrier, what is that cause that does not come from any cause? It resulted in the chain that created all causes. Muslims answer them, Cause Zero is neither a cause nor a causative, nor even a result, it is God, he was and will continue to exist, and the understanding of His nature is not within the limits of our mind, for it has no nature at all. The non-believers accuse them, that their inability to understand or know the nature of the Zero cause, made them create the idea of God in their minds, to relieve themselves of the trouble of searching. The entire dispute is based on the zero cause, assuming that determinism is a series written on us, we cannot change it, and we have no authority over it, but what if determinism is actually written on us, and we are the ones who wrote it in the first place, or perhaps we are writing it now.

Have you read about the Law of Attraction before? His believers say, that a person has what looks like broadcasting and receiving channels, and these channels transmit his thoughts to the universe, and his receivers receive the results and interact with him, he is part of it as everything else, affects and is affected, and the master here is the universe, and the reason is the person, they are his thoughts that decide the response of the universe to him, it will give him back what he thinks, and it will seek to implement it for him. If you are looking for an answer to a question that has puzzled you for a long time, all you have to do is think about it, and imagine that you will find the answer in some way, imagine that moment when you know it, and then leave it to the universe, it will come to you with the answer, as long as you broadcast the idea. Based on that, if you think about something that you hate to happen, if you think about it for a long time, it will inevitably happen to you, for the law does not differentiate between good and evil, what you want and what you hate, but rather what you think. In other words, the subconscious mind is fertile, uncultivated land, and the conscious mind or brain is a seed-sowing machine. What you think about is the kind of seeds that you will sow in your subconscious mind, and your harvest will be the result of what you sow, the more you think, you are like the one who waters and plows the land and nurtures it, and in the end, the universe will be the machine of the harvest, it will inevitably make your ideas a reality for you. This law has been strengthened in all religions and customs. In religion, God alerted us to the need to monitor our thoughts well, so he says in the honorable Prophetic hadith, “I am as my servant thinks of me,” meaning that if you think well of God, he will be with you as you think. If think that he will only send you all good, God will send it to you. In all religions you will find many texts saying like this, although this completely contradicts the law of determinism in religion, God has written everything in advance, and your belief in him will not change anything in your destiny, but even your thoughts themselves, including your good thinking of him It is something he already wrote to you. As for our ancestors, they said it from the reality of their inherited experiences, they said things like that the one who is afraid of something, it will happen to him. They summarized them in the form of popular examples, which you will find in various cultures. However, what if the believers in this law understand things from the perspective of the ancient human understanding of the sense of sight, we do not receive determinism, and the universe does not make it and does not respond to us with what we think, and we cannot change it with our thoughts, we have already drawn them in advance, and we have no escape today except for reaping what we sowed. An inevitability we managed at once, in one moment. He was silent for a moment, then added: Or perhaps, we are drawing the inevitable now, Ruslan, what if I did not exist in this world before you had a need for me? And somehow you made me, and gave me a whole life, with its memories, memories that make me feel like I have lived forty whole years, and make you feel this, you arranged them for me, and you created me, to answer all the questions I have always thought of. And while I feel like I am forty, in fact, it is one second, maybe a lot less. What if we had never met in Syria before, if you were not there, and you are still retreating in your hut on the hill, thinking about the empty, the unknown, and what happened next? It is nothing but an arrangement that you did, to transcend the authority of your mind, to get you to know the answers to everything that afflicts you, even if this life is a blank sheet of paper, you are the one who arrange it and draw it, step by step.

If you currently eat out a lot, you may go into withdrawal if you try and cut down, but there a high probability that what you are missing isn’t the food so much as the ‘third place’ factor. This neat little term describes a place that is not work or home, but a third kind of place where you feel at ease, and a part of the greater world. Town squares serve this function beautifully in many cultures where they are used as a staple of the community’s ‘going out’ life. […] It took your authors some practice to establish a repertoire of non-spending-oriented third places. We very much like our local park, which is used heavily by the surrounding community, and we often go lounge there at sunset and exchange pleasantries with people and their dogs. Maybe we bring a beer and a bag of peanuts. Maybe we don’t. It feels like a proper third place occasion though, and it costs zero to ten bucks. The library serves beautifully as a third place too. […] The beach is another great third place, as is a well-used community garden, but you can definitely get more creative.

for 100% result, don't fear by looking the complete part because zeros are all your friends, focus on make your 1%

A common factor in the history of the demise of Italian communes and the overthrow of the Weimar and Chilean democracies is the power and opposition of landed interests, which made the corridor narrower and led to an increasingly polarized society. The Red Queen effect, in turn, became much more of a zero-sum, existential fight rather than a race between state and society that advanced the capacities of both. This is visible in the Italian case from the fact that the elites started fighting not just to increase their standing against the communes but to destroy them, and the communes came to view coexistence with the elites as impossible, preferring autocracy to the elites' creeping influence. Machiavelli summed this up well in The Prince when he observed that 'the people do not wish to be commanded or oppressed by the nobles, while the nobles do desire to command and to oppress the people. From these two opposed appetites, there arises in cities one of three effects: a principality, liberty, or licence. A principality is brought about either by the common people or by the nobility, depending on which of the two parties has the opportunity. When the nobles see that they cannot resist the populace, they begin to support someone from among themselves, and make him prince in order to be able to satisfy their appetites under his protection. The common people as well, seeing that they cannot resist the nobility, give their support to one man so as to be defended by his authority.' Macchiavelli is in fact identifying a force propelling many modern-day movements sometimes labeled 'populist.' Though the term originates with the late nineteenth-century U.S. Populist movement, exemplified by the People's Party, its recent specimens, even if diverse, disparate, and lacking a generally agreed definition, do have some common hallmarks. They include a rhetoric that pits the 'people' against a scheming elite, an emphasis on the need to overhaul the system and its institutions (because they are not working for the people), a trust in a leader who (supposedly) represents the people's true wishes and interests, and a repudiation of all sorts of constraints and attempts to compromise because they will stand in the way of the movement and its leader. Contemporary populist movements, including the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) started by Hugo Chávez, and the Republican Party refashioned by Donald J. Trump in the United States, all have these features, as did the earlier fascist movements (though they augmented them with a stronger militarism and fanatical anticommunism). As in the case of the Italian communes, the elite may in fact be scheming and against the common people, but the idea that a populist movement and its all-powerful leader will protect the people's interests is just wishful thinking.

Grace Canceled: How Outrage is Destroying Lives, Ending Debate, and Endangering Democracy by Dana Loesch 4/ 5 stars Great book! Book summary: “Popular talk radio host and political activist Dana Loesch confronts the Left's zero-tolerance, accept-no-apologies ethos with a powerful call for a return to core American principles of grace, redemption, justice, and empathy. Diving deep into recent cases where public and private figures were shamed, fired, or boycotted for social missteps, Loesch shows us how the politics of outrage is fueling the breakdown of the American community. How do we find common ground without compromising? Loesch urges readers to meet the face of fury with grace, highlighting inspiring examples like Congressman Dan Crenshaw's appearance on Saturday Night Live.” “Socialists’ two favorite rhetorical tools are envy and shame, and the platform they build on is identity politics. It’s culturally sanctioned prejudice… Identity politics is a tactic of statists, who foster resentment and envy and then peddle the lie that a bigger government can make everything FAIRER. These feelings justify the cruelty inherent in identity politics. Democrats’ favorite tactic is smearing as a ‘racist’ anyone who disagrees with them, challenges their opinion, or simply exists while thinking different thoughts.” -p. 20 “Democrats still need the socialists to maintain power, but it’s a dangerous trade. Going explicitly socialist would doom the Democrats to the dustbin of history. Instead, they’re refashioning the party: It believes wealth is evil, government is your church and savior, and independence is selfishness. Virtue is extinct- ‘virtue signaling’ has replaced actual virtue.” -p. 24 “The socialist definition of social justice ignores merit, neuters ambition, and diminishes the equity of labor. Equal rewards for unequal effort is unjust and fosters resentment.” - pp. 26-7 “The state purports to act on behalf of ‘the common good’. But who defines the common good? It has long been the justification for monstrous acts by totalitarian governments. ...In this way, the common good becomes an excuse for total state control. That was the excuse on which totalitarianism was built. You can achieve the common goal better if there is a total authority, and you must then limit the desires and wishfulness of individuals.” -p. 27 “Socialism is the enemy of charity because it outsources all compassion and altruism to the state. Out of sight, out of mind, they may think-- an overarching theme throughout socialism and communism (and one is just a stepping-stone to the other)... What need is there for personal ambition if government will provide, albeit meagerly, for all your needs from cradle to grave?” -pp. 32-3

Making money is boring, people deliberately cross a line to make it sound fun, and to attain legitimacy they show off to entice people to run blindly after it! In nutshell, money is a zero-some game!

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them. Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message.80 Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense. I have described this process elsewhere.81 It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives. Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.

meet their goal of 80 percent renewable energy by 2050.12 While not having children is definitively the best choice for the environment, it is not the choice that many environmentalists make, however. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, has one child, as does Bill McKibben, who has energized a generation of young climate activists, and Michael Mann, the climate scientist behind the famous “hockey stick” figure showing rapid global warming. As my husband and I were trying to decide whether to have a child or not, I could not help but look at the choices that those around me had made.

The human animal wants a father-mother image but, at the same time, resents being disciplined. You can get stability like this: The ultimate authority source is kept remote, god-like, practically unapproachable. Your immediate superior is a mean son-of-a-bitch who makes you toe the mark and whom you therefore detest. But his own superior is as kind and sympathetic as rank allows ... The end result is that Captain Telander's been isolated. His infallibility doesn't have to cope with essentially unfixable human messes ... I'm the traditional top sergeant. Hard, harsh, demanding, overbearing, inconsiderate, brutal. Not so bad as to start a petition for my removal. But enough to irritate, be disliked, although respected. That's good for the troops. It's healthier to be mad at me than to dwell on personal woes... [First Officer] Lindgren smooths things out. As first officer, she sustains my power. But she overrules me from time to time. She exercises her rank to bend regulations in favor of mercy. Therefore she adds benignity to the attributes of Ultimate Authority.

Hindus and Muslims are unlikely to resolve the issue of whether a temple or a mosque should be built at Ayodhya by building both, or neither, or a syncretic building that is both a mosque and a temple. Nor can what might seem to be a straightforward territorial question between Albanian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs concerning Kosovo or between Jews and Arabs concerning Jerusalem be easily settled, since each place has deep historical, cultural, and emotional meaning to both peoples. Similarly, neither French authorities nor Muslim parents are likely to accept a compromise which would allow schoolgirls to wear Muslim dress every other day during the school year. Cultural questions like these involve a yes or no, zero-sum choice.

When making an authorization decision in a zero trust network, it is the agent that is in fact authorized. While it is tempting to authorize the device and user separately, this approach is not recommended. Since the agent is the entity which is authorized, it is also the thing against which policy is written.