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And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER
To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level.
Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader.
And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
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A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.
Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.
And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.
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Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
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In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.
”
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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Your words, thoughts, intentions and actions today are your best hope, comfort, building blocks and insurance for tomorrow. But it is now alone that is guaranteed – tomorrow is a dream, a maybe a potential gift. It’s now - not tomorrow - where happiness and fulfilment live...awaiting your discovery. It’s all this that will make each extra day that may arrive extra special and rich.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
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He smiled at the sudden image of Prometheus tossing cars from one side of the bridge to the other to build his barrier. He heard the tiny tinkle of glass and wondered if being tossed across the Golden Gate Bridge by an Elder was covered by insurance.
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Michael Scott (The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, #6))
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Fate, they say, fate- the clay that molds the events of your life, and it was the same fate that had thrown the stone of her heart on the building of his expectations. But then wasn't it his fault that he had constructed the building of glass? Hadn't he failed to cement the bricks of his love with trust and colour them with security? There was no insurance for broken hearts, no ointment for wounded souls and there would never be one, he knew.
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Faraaz Kazi (Truly, Madly, Deeply)
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The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
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Today the man who has the courage to build himself a house constructs a meeting place for the people who will descend upon him on foot, by car, or by telephone. Employees of the gas, the electric, and the water- works will arrive; agents from life and fire insurance companies; building inspectors, collectors of radio tax; mortgage creditors and rent assessors who tax you for living in your own home.
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Ernst Jünger (The Glass Bees)
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Everything big, once started little. Use self-control to grow to become an excellent person at what you want. Discipline yourself. Work to build excellent habits. Grow and develop excellent skills and abilities. Doing this over time, insures you will make solid progress at what you want for top success and achievement.
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Mark F. LaMoure
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Everything big, once started little. Use self-control to grow to become an excellent person at what you want. Discipline yourself and work to build excellent habits. Grow and develop excellent skills and abilities. Constant self-growth over time, insures you will make solid progress at what you want for great success and achievement.
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Mark F. LaMoure
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Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered. Nearly all the money flows to treatment rather than prevention—and when I say “prevention,” I mean prevention of human suffering.
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Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
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In today’s competitive economy, it’s not enough to simply do your job well. Developing a reputation as an expert in your field attracts people who want to hire you, do business with you and your company, and spread your ideas. It’s the ultimate form of career insurance.
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Dorie Clark (Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It)
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Everything big, once started little. Use self-control to become an excellent person at what you want. Discipline yourself. Work to build excellent habits. Develop excellent skills and abilities. Doing this over time, insures you will grow at what you want for top success.
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Mark F. LaMoure
“
On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012:
Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.
Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations,
everyone!
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Rachel Maddow
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I suggest a Money Market account with no penalties and full check-writing privileges for your emergency fund. We have a large emergency fund for our household in a mutual-fund company Money Market account. Wherever you get your mutual funds, look at the website to find Money Market accounts that pay interest equal to one-year CDs. I haven’t found bank Money Market accounts to be competitive. The FDIC does not insure the mutual-fund Money Market accounts, but I keep mine there anyway because I’ve never known one to fail. Keep in mind that the interest earned is not the main thing. The main thing is that the money is available to cover emergencies. Your wealth building is not going to happen in this account; that will come later, in other places. This account is more like insurance against rainy days than it is investing.
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds , to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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Someone starts building war power—power to insure peace, as they always say. Then other systems must have power to protect themselves. Strength begets force—and fear and hatred. Sooner or later, the strain is too great, and you have a war so horrible that its very horror makes surrender impossible.
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David Gerrold (The 10th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®)
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With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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In fact in this industry, you become a good human being. It is not rocket science. Just do business with a good heart. When you enter a business like insurance, you have to think of being there for a 100 years. It is a promise. It is a culture. The DNA is clear. When you build this together, it will last a long time.
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Tapan Singhel
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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.
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Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage)
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Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.
Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own.
But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state?
The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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In my time in Washington, no battle has consumed more energy than stopping Obamacare. On the evening of September 24, 2013, it began with a prayer. In my tiny “hideaway” office wedged into a dome in the Capitol Building, Senator Mike Lee and I bowed our heads, read from the Book of Psalms, and asked for the Lord’s guidance. I then walked to the floor of the U.S. Senate and announced, “I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.”* I opened by noting that “all across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” And yet politicians in Washington were not listening to the concerns of their constituents. They weren’t hearing the people with jobs lost or the people forced into part-time work. They had no answers for the people losing their health insurance, or the people who are struggling. With good reason, men and women across America believe that politicians get elected, go to Washington, and stop listening to them. This is the most common thing you hear from the man on the street, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: You’re not listening to me.
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Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
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Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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it was England that shone as Hamilton’s true lodestar in public finance. Back in the 1690s, the British had set up the Bank of England, enacted an excise tax on spirits, and funded its public debt—that is, pledged specific revenues to insure repayment of its debt. During the eighteenth century, it had vastly expanded that public debt. Far from weakening the country, it had produced manifold benefits. Public credit had enabled England to build up the Royal Navy, to prosecute wars around the world, to maintain a global commercial empire. At the same time, government bonds issued to pay for the debt galvanized the economy, since creditors could use them as collateral for loans. By imitating British practice, Hamilton did not intend to make America subservient to the former mother country, as critics claimed. His objective was to promote American prosperity and self-sufficiency and make the country ultimately less reliant on British capital. Hamilton wanted to use British methods to defeat Britain economically.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building… So it goes.
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Hugh Howey (Peace in Amber (The World of Kurt Vonnegut))
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A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.
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Sam Harris (Lying)
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Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world’s most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself. And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the “non-drug” offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol. And our solutions are the same futile non-solutions—build more prisons, hire more police, spend more and more billions of dollars not curing the symptoms while we ignore the disease. Most people in my area who want to kick drugs can’t afford to get into a treatment program unless they have blue-chip health insurance, which most of them don’t. And there’s a six-month-to-two-year waiting list to get a bed in a subsidized treatment program. We’re spending almost $2 billion poisoning cocaine crops and kids over here, while there’s no money at home to help someone who wants to get off drugs. It’s insanity.
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Don Winslow (The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1))
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Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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I don't know the odds of an earthquake, but I can imagine how San Francisco might be affected by one. This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much of my life is based on it.
You can build an overall theory of decision making on this idea. All you have to do is mitigate the consequences. As I said, if my portfolio is exposed to a market crash, the odds of which I can't compute, all I have to do is buy insurance, or get out and invest the amounts I am not willing to ever lose in less risky securities.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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... as Herman (1992b) cogently noted two decades ago, these personality disorders can be iatrogenic, causing harm to individuals as an inadvertent result of the social stigma they carry and the widespread (but not entirely accurate) belief among professionals and insurers that those with Cluster B personality disorders (especially borderline personality disorder[BPD]) cannot be treated successfully, cannot recover, and are a headache to practitioners. For example, the BPD diagnosis continues to be applied predominantly to women often, but not always, in a negative way, usually signifying that they are irrational and beyond help. Describing posttraumatic symptoms as a personality disorder not only can be demoralizing for the client due to its connotation that something is defective with his or her core self (i.e., personality) but also may misdirect the therapist by implying that the patient's core personality should be the focus of treatment rather than trauma-related adaptations that affect but are distinct from the core self. In this way, both therapists and their clients may overlook personality strengths and capacities that are healthy and sources of resilience that can be a basis for building on and enhancing (rather than "fixing" or remaking) the patient's core self and personality.
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Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
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This was the engine of doom.” He’d draw a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower was the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower was the triple-A tranche, just below it the double-A tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, triple-B tranche—the bonds Eisman had bet against. The Wall Street firms had taken these triple-B tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a CDO. A collateralized debt obligation. The reason they’d done this is that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce 80 percent of the bonds in it triple-A. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—which were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
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Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Animals and World Religions)
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Do you condemn the kids for not having been blessed with I.Q.s of 120? Can you condemn the kids? Can you condemn anyone? Can you condemn the colleges that give all you need to pass a board of education examination? Do you condemn the board of education for not making the exams stiffer, for not boosting the requirements, for not raising salaries, for not trying to attract better teachers, for not making sure their teachers are better equipped to teach?
Or do you condemn the meatheads all over the world who drift into the teaching profession drift into it because it offers a certain amount of paycheck every month security ,vacation-every summer luxury, or a certain amount of power , or a certain easy road when the other more difficult roads are full of ruts?
Oh he’d seen the meatheads, all right; he’d seen them in every education class he’d ever attended. The simpering female idiots who smiled and agreed with the instructor, who imparted vast knowledge gleaned from profound observations made while sitting at the back of the classroom in some ideal high school in some ideal neighborhood while an ideal teacher taught ideal students.
Or the men who were perhaps the worst, the men who sometimes seemed a little embarrassed, over having chosen the easy road, the road the security, the men who sometimes made a joke about the women not realizing they themselves were poured from the same streaming cauldron of horse manure. Had Rick been one of these men? He did not believe so….
He had wanted to teach, had honestly wanted to teach. He had not considered the security or the two-month vacation, or the short tours. He had simply wanted to teach, and he had considred taeaching a worth-while profession. He had, in fact, considered it the worthiest profession. He had held no illusions about his own capabilities. He could not paint, or write, or compose, or sculpt, or philopshize deeply, or design tall buildings. He could contribute nothing to the world creatively and this had been a disappointment to him until he’d realized he could be a big creator by teaching. For here were minds to be sculptured, here were ideas to be painted, here were lives to shape. To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do.
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Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle)
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The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police. When a person fell sick, the family took care of her. When a person grew old, the family supported her, and her children were her pension fund. When a person died, the family took care of the orphans. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand. If a person wanted to open a business, the family raised the necessary money. If a person wanted to marry, the family chose, or at least vetted, the prospective spouse. If conflict arose with a neighbour, the family muscled in. But if a person’s illness was too grave for the family to manage, or a new business demanded too large an investment, or the neighbourhood quarrel escalated to the point of violence, the local community came to the rescue.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
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Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
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The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.
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Brian Carruthers (Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business)
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Taking on a mortgage to buy a house is the classic definition of “good debt.” But don’t be so sure. The easy availability of mortgage loans tempts far too many into buying houses they don’t need or that are far more expensive than prudent. Shamefully, this overspending is often encouraged by real estate agents and mortgage brokers. If your goal is financial independence, it is also to hold as little debt as possible. This means you’ll seek the least house to meet your needs rather than the most house you can technically afford. Remember, the more house you buy, the greater its cost. Not just in higher mortgage payments, but also in higher real estate taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance and repairs, landscaping, remodeling, furnishing, and opportunity costs on all the money tied up as you build equity. To name a few. More house also means more stuff to maintain and fill it. The more and greater things you allow in your life, the more of your time, money, and life energy they demand. Houses are an expensive indulgence, not an investment. That’s OK if and when the time for such an indulgence comes. I’ve owned them myself. But don’t let yourself be blinded by the idea that owning one is necessary, always financially sound, and automatically justifies taking on this “good debt.
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J.L. Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth (Revised & Expanded 2025 Edition): Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life)
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Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-book Collection: A Brief History of Humankind and A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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Staying at Home during this lockdown period is the right time to find your life purpose within Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. This is an opportunity to know yourself better and to understand what motivates and feeds your mind and your soul, and also to find out as to where you fit in the bigger Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan.
All members of each family/clan possess characteristics, abilities, and qualities specific to that family/clan. It is up to the family/clan to distinguish itself amongst other families/clans.
Ba Ga Mohlala has become an institution to build cooperation in order to build and forge unity for social and economic benefits for Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general. An institution is social structure in which people cooperate and which influences the behavior of people and the way they live.
intelligence and assertiveness comes to us as our nature, it is in our blood (DNA) and all there is for us to do is to nature it and it will shine, otherwise it will gather dust and rust in us.
The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers. Our bond (through our shared blood/DNA) as Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan is our insurance for the future.
As Ba Ga Mohlala we can have our own Law firms, Auditing Firms, Doctors's Medical Surgeries, Private School, Private Clinics or Private Hospital, farms and lot of small to medium manufacturing, service, retail and wholesale companies and become self relient.
All it takes to achieve that is unity, willpower and commitment.
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Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
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According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread.
The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations.
Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment.
On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside.
In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population.
Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Smart Sexy Money is About Your Money
As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution.
In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully.
Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal.
Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies.
Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options.
Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal.
Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.”
Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.
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Annette Wise
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In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.
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Jack Donovan (The Way of Men)
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Justin Litzenberg is a confident person who believes he can build a successful career in whichever industry he ends up in. The meticulous quality inspector has his sights set on the financial industry and considers the insurance industry as one with endless potential. He hopes to use the skills he has learned throughout his career to start and build a successful career in the insurance industry. He has already applied to get his insurance certification.
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Justin Litzenberg
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We don’t believe in mixing investing with insurance. Insurance is for protection and investing is for wealth building. Don’t confuse or mix the two.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.
In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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During an interview with Diversity Inc.’s director of research and product development, she walked me through a typical presentation used to pitch the value of the company’s software to prospective clients. I learned that their products are especially valuable to those industries not allowed to collect ethno-racial data directly from individuals because of civil rights legislation that attempts to curb how these data are used to discriminate. But now those who work in finance, housing, and healthcare can use predictive software programs to ascertain information that they cannot request directly. The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule, for example, strictly monitors the collection, storage, and communication of individuals’ “protected health information,” among other features of the law. This means that pharmaceutical companies, which market to different groups, need indirect methods to create customer profiles, because they cannot collect racial-ethnic data directly. This is where Diversity Inc. comes in. Its software programs target customers not only on the basis of race and ethnicity, but also on the basis of socioeconomic status, gender, and a growing list of other attributes. However, the company does not refer to “race” anywhere in their product descriptions. Everything is based on individuals’ names, we are told. “A person’s name is data,” according to the director of research and product development. She explains that her clients typically supply Diversity Inc. with a database of client names and her team builds knowledge around it. The process, she says, has a 96 percent accuracy rate, because so many last names are not shared across racial–ethnic groups – a phenomenon sociologists call “cultural segregation.”18
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Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
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By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.
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Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
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My second day as chairman, a plane I lease, flying with engines I built, crashed into a building that I insure, and it was covered with a network I own,” he said just weeks afterward.
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Thomas Gryta (Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric)
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3.1. New digital business building Insurance companies, banks, energy providers, and incumbent telecommunication companies need to digitalize their businesses to stay competitive against new pure digital entrants. In most cases, the fastest and most efficient way to achieve this is not to digitalize their existing business, but to create entirely new digital businesses that are highly automated.
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Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
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The real city had been burned down many times in its long history—out of revenge, or carelessness, or spite, or even just for the insurance. Most of the big stone buildings that actually made it a city, as opposed simply to a load of hovels all in one place, survived them intact and many people22 considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.
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Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1))
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There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered. Nearly all the money flows to treatment rather than prevention—and when I say “prevention,” I mean prevention of human suffering.
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Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
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All you Need to Know About Building an Insurance App
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RobertoSSwartz
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Consider our own social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn’t spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing.
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Thomas Frank (What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America)
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Commercial property insurance protects your assets in the event that they are stolen, damaged, or destroyed in a fire or natural disaster. We’ll partner with you to design insurance coverage that will protect your company’s property. It’s worth exploring the options available to you with a business property insurance policy, as they may cover risks you hadn’t thought of. For example, some policies protect against the additional costs you face if rebuilding a damaged business facility means no longer being exempt from local building codes. Other points to check include whether a policy covers the cost of removing debris before reconstruction begins, as well as whether the business property is covered against weather event damage while being rebuilt.
Commercial property insurance is a great way to ensure that your business’ location and assets, as well as your income, are protected. Have questions? We’re happy to help!
Write By- "JMW Insurance Solution
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JMW Insurance Solution
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By the beginning of August, a rumor was flying that Chatham Phenix was not going to develop the site, as originally planned, but had found prospective developers who would. The link between the site and the developers was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had made the loan to Brown. As a Met Life board member, Al Smith had been intimate with the details of the loan to Brown and recognized the desirability of the property,
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John Tauranac (The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark)
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Glacier Wealth Management’s vision has been to build full-service wealth management, estate planning, and insurance advising firm. We recognize clients’ goals and needs are specifically unique to their individual situations. We manage finances through a comprehensive approach integrating investment advice, tax, and cost analysis strategies. We bridge the gap between financial advisors, accountants, attorneys, and insurance agents when structuring personal and business finances.
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Glacier Wealth Management
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Depending on the level of coverage your lender requires, you should be able to insure your property for about $100 per unit per year on average.
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.
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Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
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For interested consumers, there are many health pricing tools. For starters, I recommend The Wall Street Journal’s “Medicare Unmasked” tools,2 although they may be behind a paywall. The Health Care Cost Institute3 is a health-insurer funded effort to compare the cost of various procedures around the country.4 ProPublica, a non-profit news site, is one of several consumer sites that has used the CMS databases to build tools that are not exactly beloved by health care providers, including Dollars for Docs5 and Surgeon Scorecard.6
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Philip Moeller (Get What's Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs (The Get What's Yours Series))
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The property and life of an individual are surrounded by the risk of health, disability, destruction, and death. If you don’t want your family members to face these challenges, then contact us at Cherry Insurance. We help you to build a personalized and comprehensive insurance plan that has everything you need to feel safe and secure. We also provide home, business, auto, farm, and church insurance plans. For more information, you can visit our website.
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Cherry Insurance
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Disability insurance provides a portion of your income if you can't work because of an illness or non-job-related injury. To me, being over 50 doesn't lessen the need for it. On the contrary, it may increase it. Many people in their fifties are in their peak earning years and building their retirement nest egg. An extended disability at this time of life could completely derail their financial future.
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Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz (The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After Fifty: Answers to Your Most Important Money Questions)
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At Good Guys Injury Law, we’re more than just attorneys. Our Salt Lake City Personal Injury Lawyers build a connection with our clients and strive to understand their struggles and goals. Insurance companies know you as a claim number. Because we know our clients so well, we make sure the insurance adjusters get to know the person behind the paperwork – we tell your story and help them see how this accident has affected you. This adds significant value to the case and is why most cases settle without going to court or suing someone.
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Salt Lake City Personal Injury Attorney
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At Good Guys Injury Law, we’re more than just attorneys. Our Bountiful Personal Injury Lawyers build a connection with our clients and strive to understand their struggles and goals. Insurance companies know you as a claim number. Because we know our clients so well, we make sure the insurance adjusters get to know the person behind the paperwork – we tell your story and help them see how this accident has affected you. This adds significant value to the case and is why most cases settle without going to court or suing someone.
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Bountiful Personal Injury Attorney
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At Good Guys Injury Law, we’re more than just attorneys. Our Orem Personal Injury Lawyers build a connection with our clients and strive to understand their struggles and goals. Insurance companies know you as a claim number. Because we know our clients so well, we make sure the insurance adjusters get to know the person behind the paperwork – we tell your story and help them see how this accident has affected you. This adds significant value to the case and is why most cases settle without going to court or suing someone.
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Orem Personal Injury Attorney
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In short order, some managed to become physicians, legislators, undertakers, insurance men. They assumed that the question of black citizens’ rights had been settled for good and that all that confronted them was merely building on these new opportunities.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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Freedom Dumpsters Plus is a veteran-owned business offering dependable dumpster rental services for both residential and commercial needs. We provide large bins for all types of waste, including construction debris, household junk, and yard waste. With flexible rental options, we ensure dumpsters are delivered on time, every time. Fully licensed and insured, we adhere to industry standards, helping to build a cleaner and more efficient community. Contact us today!
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Freedom Dumpsters Plus
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a 2003 study, which demonstrated that consumers’ preference for an online retailer increases when they are offered competitive price information.[xxxvi] The technique has also been used by Progressive, the car insurance company, to drive over $15 billion of annual insurance sales, up from just $3.4 billion before the tactic was implemented.
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Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
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The pressure on life businesses and the capital fears prompted by the 2008 crisis have prompted the industry to build bigger capital cushions and cut costs. This has left insurers in a relatively good position. Investors have enjoyed decent dividends with payouts increasing by a cumulative 70% since 2009, according to FactSet. For shareholders, the risks to returns from life insurance have, so far, been balanced by earnings from nonlife insurance and asset management. Germany’s Allianz has U.S. bond house Pacific Investment Management Co. and nonlife insurance businesses, like property and casualty cover, around the world. Pimco has done well as interest rates declined and bond prices rose, but is expected to suffer once rates rise again—especially since founder Bill Gross walked out. France’s Axa similarly has global nonlife businesses and a large investment manager. However, these businesses ultimately will suffer from low investment returns. In nonlife, insurers can combat this with tougher underwriting standards. But demand for property-type insurance also suffers in a slower economy. Allianz has the lowest financial leverage of the big-three eurozone life insurers, and so has more flexibility to look for higher returns abroad. It also has a substantial general insurance business in the U.S., where rates should head higher sooner, and a higher expected dividend yield than France’s Axa or Italy’s Generali for this year and next.
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Anonymous
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We agreed that we wanted McDonald’s to be more than just a name used by many different people. We wanted to build a restaurant system that would be known for food of consistently high quality and uniform methods of preparation. Our aim, of course, was to insure repeat business based on the system’s reputation rather than on the quality of a single store or operator. This would require a continuing program of educating and assisting operators and a constant review of their performance. It would also require a full-time program of research and development. I knew in my bones that the key to uniformity would be in our ability to provide techniques of preparation that operators would accept because they were superior to methods they could dream up for themselves.
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Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)
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Randy Becker Bellevue is a Retirement Planning Professional at Becker Retirement Group who specialize in insurance products, such as fixed annuities and a variety of investment products that will help you build financial strategies.
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randybeckerbellevue
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MONTH ONE ACTION PLAN Open a new checking account that is free of monthly maintenance fees. Notify your employer to have your direct deposit sent to the new account. Same with any automatic payments or transfers you make from your checking account—notify everyone of the new account. Balance your checkbook each month; verify all your withdrawals and deposits, and keep track that every bill you pay is recorded as a debit on your account. Open a new savings or money market account that is FDIC insured and carries a high APY. Make it a goal to build a savings account over time that has a balance large enough to cover up to eight months of living expenses. Sign up for automatic deposits into your savings account. If you have more than $100,000 at any one institution, make sure you understand the rules for getting full insurance coverage.
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Suze Orman (Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny)
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Life insurance is meant to provide financial protection for those who are dependent on you at a point in your life when you have yet to build up other assets. Once you have accumulated assets that your dependents can fall back on—say, a sizable retirement fund or other significant investments—you no longer need life insurance.
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Suze Orman (Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny)
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Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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Be the solution, not the problem
One way you’ll be invaluable is learn to be a problem solver. That’s what Joseph was. He was solution oriented. Don’t go to your boss and say, “Our department is falling apart. This manager is about to quit. Bob cursed out Jim, and Bill keeps leaving early. Nobody paid our taxes last month. What do you want me to do?”
That’s not the way to get promoted. If you present a problem, always present a solution as well. If you can’t present a solution, hold it until you can figure out something.
A child can come tell me the building is on fire. That’s easy. That doesn’t take any skill. But I want somebody to tell me not only is the building on fire, but also the fire department is on the way, all the people are safe, the insurance company has been notified, and temporary quarters have been arranged. If you want to be invaluable to your organization, present your bosses with solutions, not problems.
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Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
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Still later, I read Ira Katznelson’s history of discrimination, When Affirmative Action Was White, which argued that similar exclusions applied to other “color-blind” New Deal programs, such as the beloved GI Bill, social security, and unemployment insurance. I was slowly apprehending that a rising tide, too, could be made to discriminate. A raft of well-researched books and articles pointed me this way. From historians, I learned that the New Deal’s exclusion of blacks was the price FDR paid to the southern senators for its passage. The price black people paid was being forced out of the greatest government-backed wealth-building opportunity in the twentieth century. The price of discrimination had more dimensions than those that were immediately observable. Since the country’s wealth was distributed along the lines of race and because black families were cordoned off, resources accrued and compounded for whites while relative poverty accrued for blacks. And so it was not simply that black people were more likely to be poor but that black people—of all classes—were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. So thick was the barrier of segregation that upper-class blacks were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than poor whites.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
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Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not.
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Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)
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Young back-to-the-landers who had felt reassured by the "real" skills of growing their own food and building their own shelter were now also experiencing what their farm neighbors and forebears had long known: relying strictly on yourself and on the land for your livelihood puts you frighteningly at the mercy of chance. An early frost, a slipped saw blade, a hot-selling market vegetable suddenly passing out of vogue- one stroke of bad luck could be devastating. Many were shocked to discover that poverty- even romantic, "turned-on" poverty- was defined not by a lack of material possessions but by a lack of control. Mortgages and health insurance and the other systems their parents had counted on to provide stability suddenly made a lot more sense.
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Kate Daloz (We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America)
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The president and his subordinates made numerous willful misrepresentations and material omissions of fact in order to (a) discredit opponents of the health insurance legislation commonly known as “Obamacare” (the PPACA), (b) secure political support for the passage of the legislation despite intense public opposition to it, and (c) win his reelection to the presidency by concealing damaging information about the prohibitively high costs and burdens of the PPACA that would have demonstrated that many of his prior representations had been false.
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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Independent” regulatory commissions and insurers and illegal aliens and doctors and private corporations and all Americans are bound by the law, not by President Obama’s whims. When he imperiously purports to waive federal statutes, he does not merely violate the law and flout his constitutional obligations. He subjects Americans to the intolerable dilemma of abiding by the law or bending to his extortionate abuse of raw power.
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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The president and his subordinates have violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The president and his subordinates at the Department of Health and Human Services have promulgated a regulatory mandate, under the PPACA, requiring that the insurance policies that Americans are now compelled to purchase must cover FDA-approved forms of contraception, including abortifacients.
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Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
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In the insurance business, 93 percent of those who become insurance agents don’t stick it out past three years. These people who quit usually lack mental toughness. I’ve learned over the years that perseverance will win out—every time—over talent.
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Jerry Hraban (Extreme Producers: Their Insights And Secrets: Quick and easy-to-read ideas that will build your insurance and financial services career)
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The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make things better just by sending out more checks.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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I found Bill in the kitchen with the Google guys. Someone was trying to figure out how to open the window. There was a lengthy discussion about windows in office buildings and insurance and the sound a body must make when it hits cement after a fifteen-story fall.
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Jay Caspian Kang (The Dead Do Not Improve)
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He came to the University of California, Berkeley, with many aspirations, but as often happens, life got in the way, and his best laid plans turned into dreams for another day. As he gazed over the building immediately in the foreground, he could see Sather Tower on Berkeley’s campus, known for resembling Campanile di San Marco in Venice.
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Rob Thomas (Big Data Revolution: What farmers, doctors and insurance agents teach us about discovering big data patterns)
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WHY HABITS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS If our programmed behaviors are so influential in guiding our everyday actions, surely harnessing the same power of habits can be a boon for industry. Indeed, for those able to shape them in an effective way, habits can be very good for the bottom line. Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line. However, the framework and practices explored in this book are not “one size fits all” and do not apply to every business or industry. Entrepreneurs should evaluate how user habits impact their particular business model and goals. While the viability of some products depends on habit-formation to thrive, that is not always the case. For example, companies selling infrequently bought or used products or services do not require habitual users—at least, not in the sense of everyday engagement. Life insurance companies, for instance, leverage salespeople, advertising, and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations to prompt consumers to buy policies. Once the policy is bought, there is nothing more the customer needs to do. In this book I refer to products in the context of businesses that require ongoing, unprompted user engagement and therefore need to build user habits. I exclude companies that compel customers to take action through
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Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
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Don’t worry,” Tandy groaned, righting herself on the seat. “After he and I fall in love, you can be the maid of honor at our lavish wedding at some stunning castle in the Greek isle.” “Oh, yeah?” I nodded in encouragement. “As a counterpoint, I have to ask; if you earn your first restraining order on this trip, do you think you’ll frame it?” “Most definitely.” A gleaming white smile brightened her face. “I’m going to hang it in my foyer so even the pizza delivery guy can see it. Then, I will happily tell the story of how I earned it. Thus insuring my legacy.” “If we don’t die in this cab, I look forward to doing my part to help build your infamy.
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Stacey Rourke (Adapted for Film)
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Table Of Contents Introduction The Problem With Contracts The Smart Solution Distinctive Properties What You Need to Know What Is A Smart Contract? Blockchain and Smart Contracts Vitalik Buterin On Smart Contracts Digital and Real-World Applications How Smart Contracts Work Smart Contracts' Historical Background A definition of Smart Contracts The promise What Do All Smart Contracts Have in Common? Elements Of Smart Contracts Characteristics of Smart Contracts Capabilities of Smart Contracts Life Cycle Of A Smart Contract Why Are Smart Contracts Important? How Do Smart Contracts Work? What Does Smart Contract Code Look Like In Practice? The Structure of a Smart Contract Interaction with Traditional Text Agreements Are Smart Contracts Enforceable? Challenges With the Widespread Adoption of Smart Contracts Non-Technical Parties: How Can They Negotiate, Draft, and Adjudicate Smart Contracts? Smart Contracts and the Reliance on “Off-chain” Resources What is the "Final" Agreement Reached by the Parties? The Automated Nature of Smart Contracts Are Smart Contracts Reversible? Smart Contract Modification and Termination The Difficulties of Integrating Specified Ambiguity Into Smart Contracts Do Smart Contracts Really Guarantee Payment? Allocation of Risk for Attacks and Failures Governing Law and Location Best Practices for Smart Contracts Types Of Smart Contracts A Technical Example of a Smart Contract Smart Contract Use-Cases Smart Contracts in Action Smart Contracts and Blockchains In the Automobile Industry Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Governments Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Business Management Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Rights Management (Tokens) Smart Contracts And Blockchains In NFTs - Gaming Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains in the Legal Industry Smart contracts and Blockchains in Real Estate Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Corporate Structures - Building DAOs Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Emerging Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Insurance Companies Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Powering DEFI Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Healthcare Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Other Industries What Smart Contracts Can Give You How Are Smart Contracts Created? Make Your Very Own Smart Contract! Are Smart Contracts Secure?
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Patrick Ejeke (Smart Contracts: What Is A Smart Contract? Complete Guide To Tech And Code That Is About To Transform The Economy-Blockchain, Web3.0, DApps, DAOs, DEFI, Crypto, IoTs, FinTech, Digital Assets Trading)
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The Atlantic puts it best: “It’s boring to point out that having more money affords you more food, more clothes, more housing, and more cars. But the richest families actually spend less on food, clothes, housing, and cars than the poorest families as a share of their income. The real difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich spend a larger share of their much larger income on insurance, education, and when you drill into the housing component, mortgages – all of which are directly related to building wealth, preserving wealth, and passing it down in the form of inheritance of direct investments in the lives of their children.
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Sim Pol (Million Dollar Habits: 27 Powerful Habits to Wire Your Mind For Success, Become Truly Happy, and Achieve Financial Freedom (Habits of Highly Effective People Book 1))
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Don't go off track and distract from the original product/service when you get interest in the cross sale. Circle back to it while building value in the offer and present it as a package deal at the close.
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Rob Liano
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but the truth is that comparing what private equity firms used to be—and where the perception of private equity still sits in many quarters—to what they are now is like comparing a Motorola cellphone from the 1990s to the latest iPhone. There’s a world of differences; it’s not even close. For pension funds and other investors in private equity funds, the firms they back gives them access to investment opportunities they can’t find or execute themselves. What’s more, they get consistent investment returns out of these opportunities, whether they include leveraged buyouts, credit investments, infrastructure assets, essential utilities, real estate transactions, technology deals, natural resources projects, banks, insurance companies, or life science opportunities. They can buy companies, carve out businesses, build up companies through acquisitions and organic growth, spin off businesses, take companies private from the public market, buy businesses from other funds they manage, draw margin loans to finance dividends, and refinance the capital structure pre-exit. And more besides.
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Sachin Khajuria (Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win)
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we forget Joseph F. Glidden's 1874 invention of barbed wire, which, more than the rifle or the plow, transformed Buffalo Bill's Great Plains by insuring the survival of thousands of family farms, and making possible the growth of enormous-and enormously profitable-cattle ranches.
In addition, I feel a personal connection.
In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal.
On May 14, nineteen days after leaving St. Louis, the brothers crossed the Missouri River and landed on the town site of Omaha, then a community of cotton tents and shanties, where lots were being offered to anyone willing to build on them. They refused this offer and pressed on to their final destination, DeSoto, Washington County, Nebraska Territory, where they found only one completed log house and another under construction. There they homesteaded the town of Blair, Nebraska. For three generations there were Carters in Nebraska, first in
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Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
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At Bowline Roofing, we stand behind our workmanship and superior products. We build relationships on top of every roof and you can rest easy because we carry the insurance and licensing necessary to keep you protected.
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Bowline Roofing
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Permanent life insurance that builds cash value can be a great tool in this situation. The premiums are paid with after-tax dollars. The policy grows tax deferred, and you can access those cash values before or after retirement on a tax-free basis as long as it is structured properly. Upon your death, the death benefit is paid to your beneficiaries generally income tax free and, if you set it up properly, estate tax free.
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Tom Hegna (Don't Worry, Retire Happy!: Seven Steps to Retirement Security)
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Life’s too short to wallow in the weeds! There are thousands of stocks to choose from. Some investors do build a career around digging into the minutiae in the footnotes. For banking and insurance analysts, it’s mandatory. But as a portfolio manager who didn’t own Enron stock, I didn’t need it. Disclosure is a wonderful thing, but I’ve never had good luck with complex corporate structures that require massive information statements. Not infrequently, companies with complex corporate structures or opaque disclosures are trying to hide something.
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Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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Sticking with the $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, MMT would have us begin by asking if it would be safe for Congress to authorize $2 trillion in new spending without offsets. A careful analysis of the economy’s existing (and anticipated) slack would guide lawmakers in making that determination. If the CBO and other independent analysts concluded it would risk pushing inflation above some desired inflation rate, then lawmakers could begin to assemble a menu of options to identify the most effective ways to mitigate that risk. Perhaps one-third, one-half, or three-fourths of the spending would need to be offset. It’s also possible that none would require offsets. Or perhaps the economy is so close to its full employment potential that PAYGO is the right policy. The point is, Congress should work backward to arrive at the answer rather than beginning with the presumption that every new dollar of spending needs to be fully offset. That helps to protect us from unwarranted tax increases and undesired inflation. It also ensures that there is always a check on any new spending. The best way to fight inflation is before it happens. In one sense, we have gotten lucky. Congress routinely makes large fiscal commitments without pausing to evaluate inflation risks. It can add hundreds of billions of dollars to the defense budget or pass tax cuts that add trillions to the fiscal deficit over time, and for the most part, we come out unscathed—at least in terms of inflation. That’s because there’s normally enough slack to absorb bigger deficits. Although excess capacity has served as a sort of insurance policy against a Congress that ignores inflation risk, maintaining idle resources comes at a price. It depresses our collective well-being by depriving us of the array of things we could have enjoyed if we had put our resources to good use. MMT aims to change that. MMT is about harnessing the power of the public purse to build an economy that lives up to its full potential while maintaining appropriate checks on that power. No one would think of Spider-Man as a superhero if he refused to use his powers to protect and serve. With great power comes great responsibility. The power of the purse belongs to all of us. It is wielded by democratically elected members of Congress, but we should think of it as a power that exists to serve us all. Overspending is an abuse of power, but so is refusing to act when more can be done to elevate the human condition without risking inflation.
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Stephanie Kelton (The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy)
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building is the central club-house of a community of a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet here—the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk (Original Classic Edition))
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This is an asset I can leverage with good debt, the property covers all operational expenses, improvements, insurance, taxes, and debt while I patiently wait for the rents to increase and the value of the property then appreciates at which point we sell or refinance and own the property with no money invested. I never deviate from this criteria. I invest my surplus cash into income-producing machines, in great locations, where the rent is less than the cost of home ownership, and I am buying at or below replacement cost. When I do invest, I buy very large deals, typically 200 to 1,000 units at a time, in markets with decades of projected job growth, and market demographics more likely to rent than own.
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Grant Cardone (How To Create Wealth Investing In Real Estate: How to Build Wealth with Multi-Family Real Estate)