“
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys...
”
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Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.
”
”
Anthony Robbins
“
There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.
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Ben Horowitz (What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture)
“
Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.
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Ben Horowitz (What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture, from the bestselling author and investor Ben Horowitz)
“
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
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Walter Lippmann
“
But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-
carpeted stairs that September noon - the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her - if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood - then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping and both were unafraid.
”
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L.M. Montgomery (Anne's House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables, #5))
“
If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in your life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve. You need to set and live by these standards no matter what happens in your life.
”
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Anthony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!)
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There is no forgiveness when one who claims a superiority falls below the standard.
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Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
“
Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology-for that applies only to a developed man-but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.
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P.D. Ouspensky
“
Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.
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Owen Hatherley (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain)
“
If you are sure that you're going to heaven when you die, you ought to make the most of today. Why live below God's standards when He has so many wonderful things planned for you?
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Jose Zayas
“
That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one’s position below that of other ethnic groups. It is angrily trashing the racist ideas about one’s own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups. It is failing to recognize that racist ideas we consume about others came from the same restaurant and the same cook who used the same ingredients to make different degrading dishes for us all.
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
“
If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in your life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.
”
”
Anthony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!)
“
...if you use a standard called "biological value" to rate protein sources... soy finishes far below eggs, milk, fish, beef and chicken. The food with the highest biological value ever measured is whey protein...
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Lou Schuler (The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess)
“
And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate. Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
I am. I’m rude because I don’t conform to society’s standards that white lies are inconsequential. I don’t believe in hiding behind words that aren’t truthful. I’m an impatient man. I don’t beat around the bush. If you ask me something, I won’t lie to you.
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Whitney Barbetti (Ten Below Zero)
“
The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t. When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
“
You run a speed test that shows their website loads at 30% below the speed it should. You draw a clear line between where they should be and how much money they lose by being below standards.
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Alex Hormozi ($100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff (Acquisition.com $100M Series))
“
The typical capitalists are lovers of power rather than sensual indulgence, but they have the same tendency to crush and to take tribute that the cruder types of sensualism possess. The discipline of the capitalist is the same as that of the frugalist. He differs from the latter in that he has no regard for the objects through which productive power is acquired. HE does not hesitate to exploit natural resources, lands, dumb animals and even his fellowman. Capital to such a man is an abstract fund, made up of perishable elements which are quickly replaced… The frugalist…stands in marked contrast to the attitude of the capitalist. The frugalist takes a vital interest in his tools, in his land, and in the goods he produces. He has a definite attachment to each. He dislikes to see an old coat wear out, an old wagon break down, or an old horse go lame. He always thinks of concrete things, wants them and nothing else. He desires not land, but a given farm, not horses or cattle and machines, but particular breeds and implements; not shelter, but a home…. He rejects as unworthy what is below standard and despises as luxurious what is above or outside of it. Dominated by activities, he thinks of capital as a means to an end.
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Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
“
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).41 It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
“
I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know
”
”
Amanda Montell (The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality)
“
Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.
In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.
Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.
This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.
The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.
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Christopher Michael Langan
“
Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But the Negro knows that these two evils have a malignant kinship. He knows this because he has worked in shops that employ him exclusively because the pay is below a living standard. He knows it is not an accident of geography that wage rates in the South are significantly lower than those in the North. He knows that the spotlight recently focused on the growth in the number of women who work is not a phenomenon in Negro life. The average Negro woman has always had to work to help keep her family in food and clothes.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
“
Using the method described below on Kindle apps or the first generation
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (without Cross-References))
“
That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one’s position below that of other ethnic groups.
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
“
Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit.
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Martha Wells (Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5))
“
a lot of young viewers, but I also have a lot of older viewers. This chapter is for my older fans—those of you who are slightly more mature. If any kids are reading this book, turn the page now. This chapter is not appropriate for children. It’s for adults who experience adult situations, such as eating dinner before 6:00 and struggling to read menus in dim lighting conditions. Many adults, myself included, have trouble reading menus when they go out to eat at restaurants because the font is way too small. I know there are products to help with this problem, like reading and magnifying glasses, but I have a better idea. Make the font size larger. There should be a worldwide standard for menu font size. I’ve included a sample menu below with a suitable font size. You’ll notice
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”
Ellen DeGeneres (Seriously...I'm Kidding)
“
The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars.
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David K. Shipler (Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams)
“
Many people don’t realize that police can’t stop anyone they want just because of a generalized suspicion. There are clear legal standards. Officers may briefly detain a person for investigative purposes only if the officer has “reasonable suspicion” that criminal activity is occurring. Reasonable suspicion is a step below the “probable cause” necessary for an arrest. “Reasonable suspicion” requires more than being in a high-crime area or acting furtive in front of police.
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Cory Booker (United)
“
On her way back to their room, it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned by her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family; that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsability to actually enslave her. They knew that the traditional wife like herself would never dream of leaving her children.
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Buchi Emecheta (The Joys of Motherhood)
“
The ones who’re so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having ’auras’ around them, they’re usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor.
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Tom Robbins (Skinny Legs and All)
“
He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who when abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or to far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries of hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings had frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches.
He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were so subjected to so many distempers and uneasiness, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagancies on one hand, and by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversion, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessing attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labour of their hands or of the head, not sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harrast with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest; not enraged with the passion of envy, or secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but in easy circumstances sliding gently thro’ the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living without the bitter, feeling that they are happy and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly.
”
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Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
“
It's the standard-issue Indian male syndrome. Mothers and sisters on a pedestal on the one hand, and loose women and prostitutes below the boot on the other. And me, a good Marathi girl like his sisters, consorting with all of you wastrels and worse. Too confusing for him.
”
”
Nayana Currimbhoy (Miss Timmins' School for Girls)
“
Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
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Renée Mauborgne (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
Richard Lynn was able to assemble eleven studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks.
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Richard J. Herrnstein (The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life)
“
Apparently Alice's CT scan was 'unremarkable', which made her feel ashamed of her mediocrity. It reminded her of her school reports with every single box ticked 'Satisfactory' and comments like, 'A quiet student. Needs to contribute more in class.' They may as well have just come right out and written across the front, 'So boring, we don't actually know who she is.' Elisabeth's reports had some boxes ticked 'Outstanding' and others ticked 'Below Standard' and comments like, 'Can be a little disruptive.' Alice had yearned to be a little disruptive, but she couldn't work out how you got started.
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Liane Moriarty (What Alice Forgot)
“
Dressed, she’s in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice. Not in front of a mirror or in front of strangers, gauging her success by their expressions of horror, disgust, etc. She did it by lying in her bed, feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension. To choose the most extreme pain would be to make a fright mask. A caricature of strength. She achieved calibration one night while testing a small muscle attached to her upper lip hitting upon a register of pain a few inches below the high-tide mark of real pain. This register of discomfort became the standard for all the muscles in her face, above the eyebrows under the jaw, across the nostrils. She didn’t check with the small mirror in the janitor’s closet, didn’t need to. She knew she’d hit it.
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Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist)
“
She rarely lets me off the hook, holding me to a different standard of emotional intelligence than the other men in her life - even my Brothers. She allows them to behave like Gary, docilely going about their lives, content and happy and completely oblivious to the sticky, ugly things just a few inches below the surface of everything.
”
”
Matthew Norman (Domestic Violets)
“
Girls Wanted to Enter Flight Stewardess Training Group
Here is the Career Opportunity for Which You Have Been Waiting!
If you are interested and feel you can meet all of the qualifications below, please write in detail and attach a full length photograph.
HEIGHT: Between 5'2" and 5'6"
WEIGHT: 135 pounds maximum
ATTRACTIVE: "Just below Hollywood" standards
Plenty of Personality and Poise
GENDER: Female
MARITAL STATUS: Single, Not Divorced,
Separated, or Widowed
RACE: White
AGE: 21-26 years old
EDUCATION: Registered Nurse or Two Years of College
VISION: 20/20 without glasses
Must be a US citizen and available for training within 6 months.
If you feel you qualify--
”
”
Judy Blume (In the Unlikely Event)
“
We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual. Lusty libertines. Rakes, rogues, and roués. Tomcats and sex kittens. Horndogs. Bitches in heat.1 True, some of us manage to rise above this aspect of our nature (or to sink below it). But these preconscious impulses remain our biological baseline, our reference point, the zero in our own personal number system. Our evolved tendencies are considered “normal” by the body each of us occupies. Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Acknowledged or not, these evolved yearnings persist and clamor for our attention. And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens.
”
”
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
“
Democracy provides the institutional framework for the reform of political institutions (other than this framework). It makes possible the reform of institutions without using violence, and thereby the use of reason in the designing of new institutions and the adjusting of old ones. It cannot provide reason. The question of the intellectual and moral standard of its citizens is to a large degree a personal problem. (The idea that this problem can be tackled, in turn, by an institutional eugenic and educational control is, I believe, mistaken ; some reasons for my belief will be given below.) It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves. In a non-democratic state, the only way to achieve reasonable reforms is by the violent overthrow of the government, and the introduction of a democratic framework. Those who criticize democracy on any ' moral ' grounds fail to distinguish between personal and institutional problems. It rests with us to improve matters. The democratic institutions cannot improve themselves. The problem of improving them is always a problem of persons rather than of institutions.
”
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Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato)
“
A gospel which contains judgement as a prominent strand, as does the New Testament gospel, is relevant to men and women everywhere and in every age and culture. It does not need indigenization,57 so popular a catchword today, but requires only clarity of language and faithfulness in proclamation. The sense of right and wrong is universal in the human race and so is the knowledge that we fall below our own standards of what is right, and that this entails death.
”
”
Broughton Knox (The Everlasting God)
“
medicine is undergoing a tremendous conceptual revolution. Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy. Healing the sick was an egalitarian project, because it assumed that there is a normative standard of physical and mental health that everyone can and should enjoy. If someone fell below the norm, it was the job of doctors to fix the problem and help him or her ‘be like everyone’.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Robert Shiller, a finance professor at Yale University, says Graham inspired his valuation approach: Shiller compares the current price of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index against average corporate profits over the past 10 years (after inflation). By scanning the historical record, Shiller has shown that when his ratio goes well above 20, the market usually delivers poor returns afterward; when it drops well below 10, stocks typically produce handsome gains down the road.
”
”
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
As shown in figure 2-2, to break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model: Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
”
”
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one’s position below that of other ethnic groups. It is angrily trashing the racist ideas about one’s own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups. It is failing to recognize that racist ideas we consume about others came from the same restaurant and the same cook who used the same ingredients to make different degrading dishes for us all. —
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
“
I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore.
And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship.
After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t.
At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications.
We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse.
Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.
the best paths are new and untried.
will this business still be around a decade from now?
business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.
The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned.
Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company.
That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them.
In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch.
There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth.
The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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Ugh,” Turner groans from the kitchen. “That skinny tramp can go fuck herself. She doesn't stand a chance. Even if I wasn't fucking committed to marrying your ass making tiny Turner babies, she's a little below my usual standards.” Naomi's eyes narrow, and I can't hold back my smile. God, I love the shit out of these stupid assholes. I hope they buy a house down the street from me, so I can watch Naomi throwing Turner's stuff out on the lawn every other Christmas. I don't admit to myself that in that fantasy, Lola Saints is in the kitchen with nothing but an apron on.
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C.M. Stunich (Tough Luck (Hard Rock Roots, #3))
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It is so rare to have a new tent appear that Celia considers canceling her performances entirely in order to spend the evening investigating it.
Instead she waits, executing her standard number of shows, finishing the last a few hours before dawn. Only then does she navigate her way through nearly empty pathways to find the latest edition to the circus.
The sign proclaims something called the Ice Garden. and Celia smiles at the addendum below which contains an apology for any thermal inconvenience.
Despite the name, she is not prepared for what awaits her inside the tent.
It is exactly what the sign described. But it is so much more than that.
There are no stripes visible on the walls, everything is sparkling and white. She cannot tell how far it stretches, the size of the tent obscured by cascading willows and twisting vines.
The air itself is magical. Crisp and sweet in her lungs as she breathes, sending a shiver down to her toes that is caused by more than the forewarned drop in temperature.
There are no patrons in the tent as she explores, circling alone around trellises covered in pale roses and a softly bubbling, elaborately carved fountain.
And everything, save for occasional lengths of whet silk ribbon strung like garlands, is made of ice.
Curious, Celia picks a frosted peony from its branch, the stem breaking easily.
But the layered petals shatter, falling from her fingers to the ground, disappearing in the blades of ivory grass below.
When she looks back at the branch, an identical bloom has already appeared.
Celia cannot imagine how much power and skill it would take not only to construct such a thing but to maintain it as well.
And she longs to know how her opponent came up with the idea. Aware that each perfectly structured topiary, every detail down to the stones that line the paths like pearls, must have been planned.
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Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
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Many of us believe that if we only had more money, we would be happier. Yet--excluding those who live below the poverty line and cannot meet their basic needs for food, shleter, safety, or medical care--greater wealth generally does not lead to substantially greater well-being. One explanation for why more money does not bring lasting happiness is that people become accustomed to their higher standard of living and desire even more money to maintain their happiness. In addition, when people become wealthier, they tend to compare themselves to other wealthy people, rather than to their peers at their previous income levels.
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Ted Cascio (House and Psychology: Humanity Is Overrated)
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Don’t ever sleep forever and don’t forever be at rest and leave the rest whilst you live though the journey of life can sometimes be so arduous! If you can’t run, crawl! If you do not want to crawl, walk! If you think walking will waste your time, gallop and if galloping is below your strength and true standard, dare to speed unrelentingly and dare to overcome all challenges! You shall always sleep or slumber only to wake up one day and realize the wide distance between you and they that crawled each second of time to the final destination of purposeful life and living unceasingly! Wake up each day and do something in the day!
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Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
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There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies.… We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!
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Stephen Kinzer (The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire)
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Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.
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Bob Hoffman (Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey)
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In one section of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft writes that she’s disgusted with how her culture keeps women down. She sees females being most valued by power-hungry men, who encourage them to serve as weak, ignorant, pretty playthings. It’s a perpetuating cycle, because men, Wollstonecraft writes, “have increased that inferiority till women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures.” She concludes, “I think the female world oppressed.” We might say that, across this volume’s dazzling stories—and alongside the beyond-compare Austen herself—it’s a belief that must seem eminently rational. Fortunately, then, as now, such a cultural diagnosis precludes neither hope nor joy.
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Christina Boyd (Rational Creatures)
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Is their average blood glucose a little bit high? Are they “spiking” above 160 mg/dL more often than I would like? Or could they perhaps tolerate a little bit more carbohydrate in their diet? Not everyone needs to restrict carbohydrates; some people can handle more than others, and some have a hard time sticking to severe carbohydrate restriction. Overall, I like to keep average glucose at or below 100 mg/dL, with a standard deviation of less than 15 mg/dL.[*5] These are aggressive goals: 100 mg/dL corresponds to an HbA1c of 5.1 percent, which is quite low. But I believe that the reward, in terms of lower risk of mortality and disease, is well worth it given the ample evidence in nondiabetics and diabetics alike.
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Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
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The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well and reference-checked great, that does not mean she will perform superbly in your company. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck. You must hold your people to a high standard, but what is that standard? I discussed this in the section “Old People.” In addition, keep the following in mind: You did not know everything when you hired her. While it feels awkward, it is perfectly reasonable to change and raise your standards as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s competitive in your industry. You must get leverage. Early on, it’s natural to spend a great deal of time integrating and orienting an executive. However, if you find yourself as busy as you were with that function before you hired or promoted the executive, then she is below standard. As CEO, you can do very little employee development. One of the most depressing lessons of my career when I became CEO was that I could not develop the people who reported to me. The demands of the job made it such that the people who reported to me had to be 99 percent ready to perform. Unlike when I ran a function or was a general manager, there was no time to develop raw talent. That can and must be done elsewhere in the company, but not at the executive level. If someone needs lots of training, she is below standard.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Triglyceride-to-HDL Ratio After assessing each of these five biomarkers, there is one more step: calculate your triglyceride-to-HDL ratio to better understand insulin sensitivity. Simply divide your triglycerides by your HDL. Interestingly, studies have shown that this value correlates well with underlying insulin resistance. So even if you are unable to access a fasting insulin test, the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio can give you a general sense of where you’re at. According to Dr. Mark Hyman, “the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is the best way to check for insulin resistance other than the insulin response test. According to a paper published in Circulation, the most powerful test to predict your risk of a heart attack is the ratio of your triglycerides to HDL. If the ratio is high, your risk for a heart attack increases sixteen-fold—or 1,600 percent! This is because triglycerides go up and HDL (or ‘good cholesterol’) goes down with diabesity.” Dr. Robert Lustig agrees: “The triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is the best biomarker of cardiovascular disease and the best surrogate marker of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.” In children, higher triglyceride-to-HDL is significantly correlated with mean insulin, waist circumferences, and insulin resistance. In adults, the ratio has shown a positive association with insulin resistance across normal weight and overweight people and significantly tracks with insulin levels, insulin sensitivity, and prediabetes. Perplexingly, the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is not a metric used in standard clinical practice. If you remember one thing from this chapter, remember this: you need to know your insulin sensitivity. It can give you lifesaving clues about early dysfunction and Bad Energy brewing in your body, and is best assessed by a fasting insulin test, discussed below. Right now, this is not a standard test offered to you at your annual physical. I implore you to find a way to get a fasting insulin test or to calculate your triglyceride-to-HDL ratio every year. Do this for your children, as well. And take the steps outlined in the following chapters to ensure it does not start creeping up. RANGES: Range considered “normal” by standard criteria: none specified in standard criteria Optimal range: Anything above a ratio of 3 is strongly suggestive of insulin resistance. You want to shoot for less than 1.5, although lower is better. I recommend aiming for less than 1.
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Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
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When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.
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Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
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Another danger is that—as is already happening to some extent—authors and editors run scared and go to absurd lengths to avoid giving offence. (An American editor rejected Polar, a picture book about a toy polar bear which is published in England by Andre Deutsch, on the ground that the text, written by Elaine Moss, states explicitly that the bear is white). A demand to avoid stereotypes can easily become in effect a demand for a different stereotype: for instance that girls should always be shown as strong, brave and resourceful, and that mothers should always have jobs and never, never wear an apron. And books written to an approved formula, or with deliberate didactic aim, do not often have the breath of life. Some members of women’s groups in North America have published their own anti-sexist books, featuring such characters as fire-fighting girls or boys who learn to crochet. Good luck to them; but those I have seen are far below professional standard.
("Are Children's Books Racist and Sexist?" from Only Connect, 2nd ed., 1980)
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John Rowe Townsend
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Most people in the Great Britain of (Adam) Smith's day lived in what most of us would regard as poverty. Hundreds of thousands were willing to risk the possibility of death in transit and years in indentured servitude for the chance to escape to the New World. Yet the population of Britain was probably better off economically than that of any major nation on the globe. To put relative poverty and wealth in perspective, let us take the standards of apparel considered necessary by ordinary day laborers, the lowest of the working poor, as recounted in The Wealth of Nations. In England, Smith reports, the poorest day laborer of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without leather shoes. In Scotland, a rung lower on the ladder of national wealth, it was considered inappropriate for men of this class to appear without shoes, but not for women. In France, a rung rower still, custom held that both men and women laborers could appear shoeless in public. Below France there were many rungs in Europe. And below Europe there were many more rungs still. (p. 56)
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Jerry Z. Muller (The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought)
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided a preliminary estimation that between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the WTC complex as of 8:46 am on September 11. At most 2,152 individual died in the WTC complex who were not 1) fire or police first responders, 2) security or fire safety personnel of the WTC or individual companies, 3) volunteer civilians who ran to the WTC after the planes' impact to help others or, 4) on the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Out of this total number of fatalities, we can account for the workplace location of 2,052 individuals, or 95.35 percent. Of this number, 1,942 or 94.64 percent either worked or were supposed to attend a meeting at or above the respective impact zones of the Twin Towers; only 110, or 5.36 percent of those who died, worked below the impact zone. While a given person's office location at the WTC does not definitively indicate where that individual died that morning or whether he or she could have evacuated, these data strongly suggest that the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone.
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9/11 Commission
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Rice is sacred to the Japanese people," he says. "We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it." He points out that the word for rice in Japanese, gohan, is the same as the word for meal.
When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause.
The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice.
Next comes okoge, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy sansho pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of chazuke, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness- the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged.
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Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
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The movement actually managed to succeed in lobbying for the passage of involuntary sterilization laws in thirty American states. This meant that the state could neuter people who fell below a particular IQ without their having any say in the matter. That each state eventually repealed the laws is a testament to common sense and compassion. That the laws existed in the first place is a frightening indication of how dangerously limited any standardized test is in calculating intelligence and the capacity to contribute to society. IQ tests can even be a matter of life and death. A criminal who commits a capital offense is not subject to the death penalty if his IQ is below seventy. However, IQ scores regularly rise over the course of a generation (by as much as twenty-five points), causing the scale to be reset every fifteen to twenty years to maintain a mean score of one hundred. Therefore, someone who commits a capital offense may be more likely to be put to death at the beginning of a cycle than at the end. That’s giving a single test an awful lot of responsibility. People can also improve their scores through study and practice. I read a case recently about a death row inmate who’d at that point spent ten years in jail on a life sentence (he wasn’t the trigger man, but he’d been involved in a robbery where someone died). During his incarceration, he took a series of courses. When retested, his IQ had risen more than ten points—suddenly making him eligible for execution.
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Ken Robinson (The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
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Just as calories differ according to how they affect the body, so too do carbohydrates. All carbohydrates break down into sugar, but the rate at which this occurs in the digestive tract varies tremendously from food to food. This difference forms the basis for the glycemic index (GI).
The GI ranks carbohydrate-containing foods according to how they affect blood glucose, from 0 (no affect at all) to 100 (equal to glucose). Gram for gram, most starchy foods raise blood glucose to very high levels and therefore have high GI values. In fact, highly processed grain products – like white bread, white rice, and prepared breakfast cereals – and the modern white potato digest so quickly that their GI ratings are even greater than table sugar (sucrose). So for breakfast, you could have a bowl of cornflakes with no added sugar, or a bowl of sugar with no added cornflakes. They would taste different but, below the neck, act more or less the same.
A related concept is the glycemic load (GL), which accounts for the different carbohydrate content of foods typically consumed. Watermelon has a high GI, but relatively little carbohydrate in a standard serving, producing a moderate GL. In contrast, white potato has a high GI and lots of carbohydrate in a serving, producing a high GL. If this sounds a bit complicated, think of GI as describing how foods rank in a laboratory setting, whereas GL as applying more directly to a real-life setting. Research has shown that the GL reliably predicts, to within about 90 percent, how blood glucose will change after an actual meal – much better than simply counting carbohydrates as people with diabetes have been taught to do.
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David Ludwig (Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently)
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As Graedon scrutinized the FDA’s standards for bioequivalence and the data that companies had to submit, he found that generics were much less equivalent than commonly assumed. The FDA’s statistical formula that defined bioequivalence as a range—a generic drug’s concentration in the blood could not fall below 80 percent or rise above 125 percent of the brand name’s concentration, using a 90 percent confidence interval—still allowed for a potential outside range of 45 percent among generics labeled as being the same. Patients getting switched from one generic to another might be on the low end one day, the high end the next. The FDA allowed drug companies to use different additional ingredients, known as excipients, that could be of lower quality. Those differences could affect a drug’s bioavailability, the amount of drug potentially absorbed into the bloodstream. But there was another problem that really drew Graedon’s attention. Generic drug companies submitted the results of patients’ blood tests in the form of bioequivalence curves. The graphs consisted of a vertical axis called Cmax, which mapped the maximum concentration of drug in the blood, and a horizontal axis called Tmax, the time to maximum concentration. The resulting curve looked like an upside-down U. The FDA was using the highest point on that curve, peak drug concentration, to assess the rate of absorption into the blood. But peak drug concentration, the point at which the blood had absorbed the largest amount of drug, was a single number at one point in time. The FDA was using that point as a stand-in for “rate of absorption.” So long as the generic hit a similar peak of drug concentration in the blood as the brand name, it could be deemed bioequivalent, even if the two curves reflecting the time to that peak looked totally different. Two different curves indicated two entirely different experiences in the body, Graedon realized. The measurement of time to maximum concentration, the horizontal axis, was crucial for time-release drugs, which had not been widely available when the FDA first created its bioequivalence standard in 1992. That standard had not been meaningfully updated since then. “The time to Tmax can vary all over the place and they don’t give a damn,” Graedon emailed a reporter. That “seems pretty bizarre to us.” Though the FDA asserted that it wouldn’t approve generics with “clinically significant” differences in release rates, the agency didn’t disclose data filed by the companies, so it was impossible to know how dramatic the differences were.
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Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
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The Four Actions Framework consists of four questions that are designed to challenge an industry’s established structure and business logic: (1) Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? (2) Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? (3) Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? (4) Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
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Anonymous
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The critics cite malpractice suits as evidence that DID treatment is harmful (e.g., McHugh, 2013). There have been malpractice suits for treatments of most major psychiatric and medical disorders. If a plaintiff wins in a lawsuit against a clinician for malpractice, it does not follow that the established treatment model itself is at fault. Rather, the judgment is that the treatment fell below the standard of care. All treatments, including those for DID, should be consistent with the current standard of care. It is illogical to conclude that because a few therapists have failed to do this for individual DID patients, all DID treatment is harmful.
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Bethany L. Brand
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The gold standard created what economists have called a “golden straitjacket.” Debtor nations would exchange control over their monetary policy for capital mobility and stable exchange rates. Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.
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Richard White (The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States))
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Thyroid. Test Thyroid Stimulating Hormone annually. The test is called TSH and could indicate thyroid problems if too high. In such cases, energy levels will be low, and exercise will have less benefit. The standard “too high” level is 4 uiu/ml (or miu/L), but the warning bells should chime at anything above 2.5. For men, a doctor should be seen if this is the case and total testosterone is below 350/dl. For women, T3 and T4 should measured, and a doctor seen if they are low. We cannot give a precise number here, because different labs use different tests for this one. So here “low” should be taken to mean low according to the lab report. The cure for a weak thyroid is levothyroxine, a very inexpensive prescription medicine.
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Mike Nichols (Quantitative Medicine: Using Targeted Exercise and Diet to Reverse Aging and Chronic Disease)
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below the standard of practice for a reasonably well-qualified and competent forensic anthropologist, at this current time and place, to not perform microscopic
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John Ferak (Wrecking Crew: Demolishing The Case Against Steven Avery)
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MY RECOMMENDATION Below is my advice about regarding selling SpaceX stock or options. No complicated analysis is required, as the rules of thumb are pretty simple. If you believe that SpaceX will execute better than the average public company, then our stock price will continue to appreciate at a rate greater than that of the stock market, which would be the next highest return place to invest money over the long term. Therefore, you should sell only the amount that you need to improve your standard of living in the short to medium term. I do actually recommend selling some amount of stock, even if you are certain it will appreciate, as life is short and a bit more cash can increase fun and reduce stress at home (so long as you don’t ratchet up your ongoing personal expenditures proportionately). To maximize your post tax return, you are probably best off exercising your options to convert them to stock (if you can afford to do this) and then holding the stock for a year before selling it at our roughly biannual liquidity events. This allows you to pay the capital gains tax rate, instead of the income tax rate.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
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humans have been walking and running on their bare feet for millions of years, and many people still do. Moreover, when people did start to wear shoes, probably around 45,000 years ago,2 their footwear was minimal by today’s standards, without thick, cushioned heels, arch supports, and other common features. The oldest known sandals, dated to 10,000 years ago, had thin soles that were tied onto the ankle with twine; the oldest preserved shoes, dated to 5,500 years ago, were basically moccasins.3 Shoes are now ubiquitous in the developed world, where being barefoot is often considered eccentric, vulgar, or unhygienic. Many restaurants and businesses won’t serve barefoot customers, and it is commonly believed that comfortable, supportive shoes are healthy.4 The mind-set that wearing shoes is more normal and better than being barefoot has been especially evident in the controversy over barefoot running. Interest in the topic was ignited in 2009 by the best-selling book Born to Run, which was about an ultramarathon in a remote region of northern Mexico, but which also argued that running shoes cause injury.5 A year later, my colleagues and I published a study on how and why barefoot people can run comfortably on hard surfaces by landing in an impact-free way that requires no cushioning from a shoe (more on this below).6 Ever since, there has been much passionate public debate. And, as is often the case, the most extreme views tend to get the most attention. At one extreme are enthusiasts of barefoot running, who decry shoes as unnecessary and injurious, and at the other extreme are vigorous opponents of barefoot running, who think that most runners should wear supportive shoes to avoid injury. Some
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Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
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In the past, security guides often suggested that it was necessary to overwrite multiple times (or “passes”). This may be true to some extent for flash media, as described below, but is apparently no longer true for traditional magnetic hard drives. See National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST Special Publication 800-88, Revision 1. “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” (Dec. 2014) (“For storage devices containing magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a [fixed] pattern such as binary zeroes typically hinders recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data.”)
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Sophia Cope (Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data on Your Devices and in the Cloud)
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Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.
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Matthew Pearl (The Dante Club (The Dante Club, #1))
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the sequester would cost the economy 750,000 jobs a year and hurt millions of Americans who were reliant on public services. Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in the country’s history. The stock market plummeted, falling 635 points on the spot. The public, meanwhile, was so disgusted with Congress that polls registered the lowest approval rating in the history of such measurements. Obama’s popularity also took a hit, dropping below the all-important 50 percent threshold for the first time. He was derided and belittled by both the Left and the Right. Internal polls called him “weak.
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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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Classical education was only half the old system of European education--below it and above it there was the religious education that was common to the whole people, and the higher theological education that was peculiar to the clergy, who provided the majority of the teachers in both the other departments of education.
Now the lowest level of this structure, which has been least studied and least regarded, was the most important of them all. It is true that it differed considerably in different parts of Europe, but for the religious rather than material reasons. In Protestant Europe it was founded on the Bible and the catechism, whereas in Catholic Europe it was based on the liturgy and on religious art and drama and mime, which made the Church the school of the people. But in either case it provided a system of common beliefs and moral standards, as well as the archetypal patterns of world history and sacred story which formed the background of their spiritual world.
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Christopher Henry Dawson (Understanding Europe (Works of Christopher Dawson))
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Emotional intelligence is making a huge mistake, but learning from it, forgiving yourself, and setting new and higher related-standards below which you will never operate.
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Jacinta Mpalyenkana
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All the standardized tests said I was below-average reader, but Mrs. Stancil kept me after cool every day to tutor me. I don't remember when the blocks of words began to make sence, but by the end of that school year I'd gone from book hater to bookworm.
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Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
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Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.
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Ben Horowitz (What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture)
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After the CCP gained power, it sealed China off from information beyond its borders, and imposed a wholesale negation of China’s traditional moral standards. The government’s monopoly on information gave it a monopoly on truth. As the center of power, the party Center was also the heart of truth and information. All social science research organs endorsed the validity of the Communist regime; every cultural and arts group lavished praise on the CCP, while news organs daily verified its wisdom and might. From nursery school to university, the chief mission was to inculcate a Communist worldview in the minds of all students. The social science research institutes, cultural groups, news organs, and schools all became tools for the party’s monopoly on thought, spirit, and opinion, and were continuously engaged in molding China’s youth. People employed in this work were proud to be considered “engineers of the human soul.” In this thought and information vacuum, the central government used its monopoly apparatus to instill Communist values while criticizing and eradicating all other values. In this way, young people developed distinct and intense feelings of right and wrong, love and hate, which took the shape of a violent longing to realize Communist ideals. Any words or deeds that diverged from these ideals would be met with a concerted attack. The party organization was even more effective at instilling values than the social science research institutes, news and cultural organs, and schools. Each level of the party had a core surrounded by a group of stalwarts, with each layer controlling the one below it and loyal to the one above. Successive political movements, hundreds and thousands of large and small group meetings, commendation ceremonies and struggle sessions, rewards and penalties, all served to draw young people onto a single trajectory. All views diverging from those of the party were nipped in the bud.
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Yang Jisheng (Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962)
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WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE TO YOU? Success has a different meaning for each person. Most of the artists I work with say that they will consider themselves successful once they can support their family with their art. Some will only consider themselves successful when they have reached a desired achievement or have impacted the world in a positive way with their art. Only you can decide what success means to you. Below are examples of what success looks like to some people: Earning a healthy income to support a family Living a lifestyle that enables you to do the things you love Developing a reputation for creating meaningful art Making a true difference in the world with art Developing a technique that becomes a new standard in the art world Becoming known as the best in your genre
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Maria Brophy (Art Money & Success: A complete and easy-to-follow system for the artist who wasn't born with a business mind.)
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Food License Consultant
A food license consultant is one type of bridge that can help you to issue your food license. There are many companies available that can help you to grow your business. They can guide your whole process and explain the fee structure and government fee and some legal documents.
If you are looking for the best food license consultants in your city then you can visit our website. Here you can get many verified professionals.
Here are some details about the food license which are listed below.
What is Food License?
What is Food License Registration?
What are the types of FSSAI Licenses?
What are the documents needed for Food License Registration?
What is a food License (FSSAI License)?
FSSAI stands for Food Safety Standards Authority of India, which is a statutory body established under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India. It has been established under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, which is related to food safety and regulation in India. A food license is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through regulation and supervision of food safety.
Food License Registration
A food license is required for every person who wants to start a food business, who can involve in any kind of business like manufacturing, processing, distribution, or sale of food products, etc.
A food license consists of 14 digit license number, which can print on all the food packages item. It gives all information regarding the assembling and owner’s permit.
The motive of registration is to make the food business operators more responsible that can maintain the quality of food products.
Types Of FSSAI License
There are different types of food licenses that can depend on the scale of business, and on the turnover provided by the business owner. The government issue different type of license based on the food business operator activity. The types if food licenses are as below:
1) FSSAI Basic Registration: The FSSAI basic license registration for those who have a small-scale business. If their turnover is less than 12 lakh then apply for basic registration.
2) FSSAI State License: The FSSAI State License registration for those who have medium-scale businesses. If their turnover is more than 12 Lakh or up to 20 crores.
3) FSSAI Central License: The FSSAI Central License registration for those who have large-scale businesses. If their turnover is more than 20 crores then it can apply for Central License.
Document required for Food License Registration
The food license registration document required for the proprietorship Concern or a single person
1) Rental Agreement
2) Pan Card
3) Two Photos
4) ID Proof
The food license registration document required for the Partnership Firm
1) Pan Card of Partnership Firm
2) All partner’s Id and Address Proof
3) Two Photos of Each Partner
4) Rental Agreement
The food license registration document required for Private Limited Company
1) Pan Card of Private Limited Company.
2) Incorporation Certificate of Private Limited Company.
3) All Director’s Id and Address Proof
4) Two Photos of Each Director.
5) Rental Agreement.
Best FSSAI License Consultant in India
We are a team of FSSAI Registration centers, helping business owners in the registration, and certification procedures all over India.
If you have further queries or doubts, then please visit our website.
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Dhaval
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products are dramatically cheaper than Apple’s. Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.
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Ben Horowitz (What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture)
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Like all economists, Keynes expected British employment to recover to ‘normal’ (as measured by pre-war standards) when prices ‘settled down’ in 1922. But unemployment remained obstinately stuck at above 10%. It was its failure to come down much below this rate for the rest of the 1920s which alerted Keynes to the possibility that the employment costs of a savage deflation might be more than ‘transitional’, with the economy remaining ‘jammed’ in a low-employment trap.
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Robert Skidelsky (Keynes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Years ago, I represented a client, a firefighter/paramedic, in an administrative trial after he had been terminated for allegedly providing patient care that was below the department’s established standards. One central issue was the ongoing, on-the-job training firefighters/paramedics receive. Throughout the trial, senior officers of the department, including the Chief himself, preached and bloviated on and on about how the department is committed to providing only the best patient care and how their paramedics are held to a higher standard; how they are committed to serving the community with the highest level of blah, blah, blah. On cross examination, however, I asked each of them about how many hours a day each provider spends drilling or practicing firefighting technique and equipment. Each of them answered proudly that every firefighter/EMT and firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least three hours each day practicing firefighting skills and/or rehearsing the use of various firefighting equipment; hoses, ladders, saws, and other firefighter equipment. Ok, that’s great. Through testimony, we determined that, based on a 10-shift work month, each firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least 30 hours per month drilling, practicing, and/or rehearsing firefighting skills & equipment. That’s at a minimum of 360 hours per year of ongoing, on-the-job firefighter training. Outstanding. When the smoke is showing and the flames are roiling, they will be ready. They all displayed the same proud grin at how well trained their people are. For each of them, however, that smug grin quickly turned when I then asked about the number of hours per day each firefighter/paramedic spends drilling on or practicing patient care related techniques, skills, and tools. Every one of them squirmed as they responded with the truth that the department only offers three hours of patient care related education per month. That’s roughly a maximum of 36 hours of paramedic training for the entire year. It got worse when further testimony showed that patient care related calls account for more than 80 percent of their call volume and fire related calls less than 20 percent, I could see each of them deflate on the witness stand when I asked how they could truthfully say they were committed to providing the best patient care when barely 10 percent of their training addresses patient care, which constitutes over 80 percent of your department’s calls. The answers were more disjointed and nonsensical than a White House press briefing. Of course, across America the 10:1 ratio of ongoing firefighting training to EMS training is pretty consistent, which begs the question: Don’t they get it? Excellence is the product of practice. How can any rational person look at a 10:1 training ratio and declare themselves committed to the highest level of care? How can an agency neglect training on the most significant aspect of the business and then be surprised when issues of negligence and liability arise? Once again, it seems that old-school culture leaves EMS stuck in the mud and the law is not going to wait for agencies to figure out that living in the past compromises the future.
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David Givot (Sirens, Lights, and Lawyers: The Law & Other Really Important Stuff EMS Providers Never Learned in School)
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Waarom zouden we mooi moeten zijn? Waarom draait alles daarom? Mooi voor wie? Noem me een heldin. Noem me vindingrijk. Noem me een fucking wervelstorm. Ja, dat wil ik zijn, een wervelstorm.
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Sophie Hardcastle (Below Deck)
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As late as 1930, most American homes did not have a refrigerator but, by the end of the decade, most did. By 1970, virtually all families living in poverty had refrigerators. By 1994, most American households below the poverty line had a microwave oven and a videocassette recorder-things that less than one percent of all American households had in 1971.
All of this went into raising the standard of living of the average American. It was not political rhetoric, mass rallies or poses of moral indignation that gave the people a better life. It was capitalism.
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Thomas Sowell (Controversial Essays (Hoover Institution Press Publication))
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I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to knowThe hormonal rewards of constantly checking our phones fatigue the mind just as much as the stressors do. Studies of phone addiction have found the little hits of dopamine that keep users jonesing for notifications come with a tragic side effect. They actually inhibit the amount of dopamine we feel when exposed to real-life novelty. Said another way, phone addiction decreases our ability to enjoy new experiences in the physical world. When you’re hooked on novelty in electronic form, new foods and flowers lose their magic.
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Amanda Montell
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Let’s say, for example, that you figure you’re 25% better than average at picking stocks, and you think you can earn 15% a year on your portfolio. That sounds realistic enough—until you consider the third question. The long-term average annual return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of blue-chip stocks is 10.4%. If, however, you adjust that number for the cash that people added to and subtracted from their portfolios, the average return drops to just 8.6% annually since 1926. Factor in taxes, trading costs, and inflation, and the annual return of the typical investor drops below 4%. If you really are 25% better than average, you shouldn’t expect to earn much more than 5% annually after all your costs. You still might be able to earn 15% a year—if you are at least three times better than average. Only by asking all three questions can you tell just how crazy your inner con man is.
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Jason Zweig (Your Money and Your Brain)
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This is the Orlando, the city of joy and wonders! If you are out with your family having the time of your life, sourcing for a perfect place to get a feed is part of the fun! Below, I have gathered some of the best restaurants in Orlando suitable for children so that you can narrow down the best restaurant to go eat in with your whole family. Whether it be a simple take away or a sit down meal after an activity filled day, Orlando is filled with excellent restaurants. We are now going to look for some nice places to enjoy some delicious food!
The Qualities to Look for When Searching for Restaurants to Bring You Kids to
Now not every restaurant is primarily super fun for children but there are restaurants that make the effort to make it fun for the children. Here’s what to look for:Here’s what to look for:
Special Menus for Children: Select restaurants that have kids’ menu with a lot of options on the list. This does not refer to just the standard fare of chicken nuggets and french fries; places to eat with healthy and compelling options are marked.
Entertainment and Activities: It is always those restaurants that offer some content that will entertain the children as they wait for the food to cook can be a god send. Imagine, colouring books plane areas or an interactive table game.
Family-friendly Atmosphere: This means the atmosphere of the restaurant should be quite informal and on the same note, children should be encouraged and any restrictions regarding them should be put to a stop. This ensemble involves; patient and understanding staff regarding the children and well arranged sitting arrangements that will easily contain strollers and high chairs.
Convenient Amenities: Facilities concerning the exchange of diapers at restrooms and high chairs and booster seats are quite acceptable in dining for families.
Healthy and Nutritious Options: However, the top kid-friendly restaurants go one step further than ensuring that children like the food, and choose dishes that are also healthy. More desirable products features would be that they are healthy meals that also allow the choice of specific amendments according to ones preference.
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Kidrestaurant
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Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela.
Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance.
'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well.
The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov.
"One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.
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John Follain (Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal)
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QUALITY: The Carpenter’s House An elderly carpenter was about to retire. He told his employer-contractor of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife, enjoying his extended family. He would miss the paycheck, but he needed to retire. They could get by. His contractor was sorry to see his good worker go. He asked the carpenter to build just one more house before retiring. The carpenter accepted, even though he didn’t really want to do so. His heart was not in his work anymore. He put in a half-hearted effort, taking shortcuts and using inferior building materials. The quality of the finished building was much below his usual standards. When the project finished, the contractor came to see the house. He took a look around, then he took out the front-door key and handed it to the contractor. "My friend, this house is yours. This is my gift to you as a thank you for all these years of hard work." The contractor said. The old man was shocked and embarrassed. If only he had known, things would have been done in a different way. He would have taken care of every detail and this house would be the most beautiful house that he’d ever built. Like the old carpenter, many of us do not give the job our best effort. Then we find ourselves living in the poor quality house we have built.
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Barry Powell (99 Inspiring Stories for Presentations: Inspire your Audience & Get your Message Through)
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Ah, my good barman, might we purchase one of your fine libations? An ale perhaps?” Gaius asked. The barman nodded in greeting at the two. “Certainly; two ales it is then?” Gaius nodded. Smiling, the barman reached down below the bar and pulled up two sets of documents bound by a small string loop in the upper left corner. The documents appeared to be some form of contract. “I just need you to sign the waiver of liability, the acknowledgement of the health dangers of alcohol, tobacco and other substances within our foods, along with the absolution of responsibility for any actions taken by you after partaking in food and beverage within these premises.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Just the standard stuff you have to sign everywhere these days. Nothing unusual, all on the same old eight pages.” He shrugged. “Oh, and of course, an ID to verify the name and signature.
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J.L. Langland (The Heavenly Host (Demons of Astlan, #2))
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On August 5, the Standard & Poor’s rating agency—citing, among other factors, the prospect of future budget brinkmanship—downgraded U.S. government debt to one notch below the top AAA rating. The rating agency had made an egregious error that caused it to overstate the estimated ten-year deficit by $2 trillion, which the Treasury quickly pointed out. S&P acknowledged the error but asserted that the mistake did not affect its judgment of the government’s creditworthiness. I had the feeling that S&P wanted to show it was not intimidated. The episode highlighted the odd relationship between governments and rating agencies: Governments regulate the rating agencies, but the rating agencies have the power to downgrade governments’ debt.
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Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
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Physicians should use individualized approaches to managing young patients with slowly rising PSA levels who initially achieved a very low nadir and who might be a candidate for salvage local therapies” (see below). The Phoenix definition is the new standard measure of the success of radiation therapy. And even this isn’t the one-size-fits-all, perfect definition of biochemical failure for all men who have undergone radiation. Nor is there a single best approach if a man’s cancer does return after radiation (see What Happens If My PSA Goes Up After Radiation Treatment? below). The good news is that the longer a man’s PSA remains stably low after radiation, the less likely he is to have a return of cancer down the road. Some men wonder whether any healthy
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Patrick C. Walsh (Dr. Patrick Walsh's Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer)
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regression line will have larger standard deviations and, hence, larger standard errors. The computer calculates the slope, intercept, standard error of the slope, and the level at which the slope is statistically significant. Key Point The significance of the slope tests the relationship. Consider the following example. A management analyst with the Department of Defense wishes to evaluate the impact of teamwork on the productivity of naval shipyard repair facilities. Although all shipyards are required to use teamwork management strategies, these strategies are assumed to vary in practice. Coincidentally, a recently implemented employee survey asked about the perceived use and effectiveness of teamwork. These items have been aggregated into a single index variable that measures teamwork. Employees were also asked questions about perceived performance, as measured by productivity, customer orientation, planning and scheduling, and employee motivation. These items were combined into an index measure of work productivity. Both index measures are continuous variables. The analyst wants to know whether a relationship exists between perceived productivity and teamwork. Table 14.1 shows the computer output obtained from a simple regression. The slope, b, is 0.223; the slope coefficient of teamwork is positive; and the slope is significant at the 1 percent level. Thus, perceptions of teamwork are positively associated with productivity. The t-test statistic, 5.053, is calculated as 0.223/0.044 (rounding errors explain the difference from the printed value of t). Other statistics shown in Table 14.1 are discussed below. The appropriate notation for this relationship is shown below. Either the t-test statistic or the standard error should be shown in parentheses, directly below the regression coefficient; analysts should state which statistic is shown. Here, we show the t-test statistic:3 The level of significance of the regression coefficient is indicated with asterisks, which conforms to the p-value legend that should also be shown. Typically, two asterisks are used to indicate a 1 percent level of significance, one asterisk for a 5 percent level of significance, and no asterisk for coefficients that are insignificant.4 Table 14.1 Simple Regression Output Note: SEE = standard error of the estimate; SE = standard error; Sig. = significance.
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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Table 14.1 also shows R-square (R2), which is called the coefficient of determination. R-square is of great interest: its value is interpreted as the percentage of variation in the dependent variable that is explained by the independent variable. R-square varies from zero to one, and is called a goodness-of-fit measure.5 In our example, teamwork explains only 7.4 percent of the variation in productivity. Although teamwork is significantly associated with productivity, it is quite likely that other factors also affect it. It is conceivable that other factors might be more strongly associated with productivity and that, when controlled for other factors, teamwork is no longer significant. Typically, values of R2 below 0.20 are considered to indicate weak relationships, those between 0.20 and 0.40 indicate moderate relationships, and those above 0.40 indicate strong relationships. Values of R2 above 0.65 are considered to indicate very strong relationships. R is called the multiple correlation coefficient and is always 0 ≤ R ≤ 1. To summarize up to this point, simple regression provides three critically important pieces of information about bivariate relationships involving two continuous variables: (1) the level of significance at which two variables are associated, if at all (t-statistic), (2) whether the relationship between the two variables is positive or negative (b), and (3) the strength of the relationship (R2). Key Point R-square is a measure of the strength of the relationship. Its value goes from 0 to 1. The primary purpose of regression analysis is hypothesis testing, not prediction. In our example, the regression model is used to test the hypothesis that teamwork is related to productivity. However, if the analyst wants to predict the variable “productivity,” the regression output also shows the SEE, or the standard error of the estimate (see Table 14.1). This is a measure of the spread of y values around the regression line as calculated for the mean value of the independent variable, only, and assuming a large sample. The standard error of the estimate has an interpretation in terms of the normal curve, that is, 68 percent of y values lie within one standard error from the calculated value of y, as calculated for the mean value of x using the preceding regression model. Thus, if the mean index value of the variable “teamwork” is 5.0, then the calculated (or predicted) value of “productivity” is [4.026 + 0.223*5 =] 5.141. Because SEE = 0.825, it follows that 68 percent of productivity values will lie 60.825 from 5.141 when “teamwork” = 5. Predictions of y for other values of x have larger standard errors.6 Assumptions and Notation There are three simple regression assumptions. First, simple regression assumes that the relationship between two variables is linear. The linearity of bivariate relationships is easily determined through visual inspection, as shown in Figure 14.2. In fact, all analysis of relationships involving continuous variables should begin with a scatterplot. When variable
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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I like the bumper sticker that reads, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” But that does not give us license to live below God’s standard.
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Billy Graham (Billy graham in quotes)
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If it’s not ready, we’re not going to send it out, and just hope they don’t notice that it’s not that good. We’ll fix it. We’ll do something else, but don’t try to slip by something that you know is below the standard.’ You
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)