Calculating Bond Quotes

When we calculate risks and incentives and align our desires with reality to achieve inner peace, we may reach self-mastery. Precision offers clarity and reduces insecurity. But we must not ignore the emotional bonds with the lived experience of love and joy. They often transcend metrics, preferring a balance between a rational approach and the priorities of our intuition. (“ Measuring space »)

Why do I trust you?” Gal asks. My blood runs cold. But Gal’s tone isn’t cruel or calculating. It’s hopeful. Warming. He’s on to something. “Maybe you don’t trust me—I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, after everything—but I trust you with my life. I know I can trust you because you throw your life on the line to save me. Time and time again, no matter how little I deserve it. You’ve sacrificed everything for me.

There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random.

Karl Marx already saw this in his time, writing in the Communist Manifesto: Wherever the bourgeoisie has come to dominate, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic conditions. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley bands that attached man to his natural superior, leaving no other bond between man than naked self-interest, inexorable “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentality in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore? A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- what I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled.... If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume. I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet. In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick. Many women are damaged in childhood -- unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defences against other women since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses -- namely other women? Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute (and look like darling daughters) and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions (and look like scary mothers), but they don't really know what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men, and creating male pecking orders, to pay attention to us. If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: we are not yet good at this. We are still quarrelling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.

God wants more than kin loving kin. He wants more than the natural bonds. He wants more than biology. He wants our love to do more than run around the tight circle of our self-interest; more, even, than that it should run around the wider circle of our altruism, if altruism means we get some kind of round-about payback for love in the end. God, he says, wants us to love wildly and without calculation. God wants us to love people we don’t even like; people we hate; people who hate us. He says this, and he looks away from the familiar faces who’re bobbing up and down behind the wall of shoulders in the doorway, calling to him, trying to be heard.

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves.

When a human sees a snake, fear arises because millions of neurons in the brain swiftly calculate the relevant data and conclude that the probability of death is high. Feeling of sexual attraction arise when other biochemical algorithms calculate that a nearby individual offers a high probability of successful mating. Social bonding or some other coveted goal. Moral feelings such as outrage, guilt or forgiveness derive from neural mechanisms that evolved to enable group cooperation. All these biochemical algorithms were honed though millions of years of evolution. If the feelings of some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary rationality.

Nearly all the bull markets had a number of well-defined characteristics in common, such as (1) a historically high price level, (2) high price/earnings ratios, (3) low dividend yields as against bond yields, (4) much speculation on margin, and (5) many offerings of new common-stock issues of poor quality. Thus to the student of stock-market history it appeared that the intelligent investor should have been able to identify the recurrent bear and bull markets, to buy in the former and sell in the latter, and to do so for the most part at reasonably short intervals of time. Various methods were developed for determining buying and selling levels of the general market, based on either value factors or percentage movements of prices or both. But we must point out that even prior to the unprecedented bull market that began in 1949, there were sufficient variations in the successive market cycles to complicate and sometimes frustrate the desirable process of buying low and selling high. The most notable of these departures, of course, was the great bull market of the late 1920s, which threw all calculations badly out

Pat Riley, the famous coach and manager who led the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat to multiple championships, says that great teams tend to follow a trajectory. When they start—before they have won—a team is innocent. If the conditions are right, they come together, they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal. This stage, he calls the “Innocent Climb.” After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear. The Innocent Climb, Pat Riley says, is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.” It can “strike any winning team in any year and at any moment,” and does with alarming regularity. It’s Shaq and Kobe, unable to play together. It’s Jordan punching Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, and Will Perdue—his own team members. He punched people on his own team! It’s Enron employees plunging California into darkness for personal profit. It’s leaks to the media from a disgruntled executive hoping to scuttle a project he dislikes. It’s negging and every other intimidation tactic.

Economics should help us rise above fear and greed. It should not exploit these feelings. Economic science should be about how one turns a social vision into a modern economic system. It should be a tool to create opportunities for human and social development. Not just address our fears as they are expressed as demand in the market. It should be devoted to concrete questions that are important for humanity. Not to abstract analyses of hypothetical choices. It should see people as reasonable beings. Not as wagons hooked to the consequences of an unavoidable, coercive rationality. It should see people as embedded in society. Not as individuals whose core never changes and who float in a vacuum at an arm’s length from each other. It should see relationships as fundamental for us to even be able to individuate ourselves. Not as something that can be reduced to competition, profit, loss, buying low, selling high and calculating who won. It should see a person as someone who acts according to her bonds with others. Not just out of self-interest and the denial of all context and power relationships. It should not see self-interest and altruism as opposites – because it should no longer view the surrounding world as something that is in opposition to one’s self.

[Aza Raskin] designed something that distinctly changed how the web works. It's called 'infinite scroll.' Older readers will remember that it used to be that the internet was divided into pages, and when you got to the bottom of one page, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page. It was an active choice. It gave you a moment to pause and ask: Do I want to carry on looking at this? Aza designed the code that means you don't have to ask that question any more. ...It downloads a chunk of status updates for your to read through ...when you get to the bottom, it will automatically load another chunk for your to flick through. ...'At the outset, it looks like a really good invention,' he told me. He believed he was making life easier for everyone. He had been taught that increased speed and efficiency of access were always advances. his invention quickly spread all over the internet ...But then Aza watched as the people around him changed. They seemed to be unable to pull themselves away from their devices, flicking through and through and through, thanks in part to the code he had designed. He found himself infinitely scrolling through what he often realised afterwards was crap, and he wondered if he was making good use of his life. ...Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter. (For many people, Aza believes, it's vastly more.) Sticking with this low-ball percentage, Aza wanted to know what it meant, in practice, if billions of people were spending 50 percent more time on a string of social media sites. When he was done, he stared at the sums. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more total human lifetimes - every moment from birth to death - is now spent scrolling through a screen. These hours would otherwise have been spent on some other activity. When he described this to me, he sounded a little stunned. That time is 'just completely gone. It's like their entire life - poof. That time, which could have been used for solving climate change, for spending time with their family, for strengthening social bonds. For whatever is it that makes their life well-lived. It's just...' He trailed off.

Mowbray! Been a while since you bothered with the season. What brings you to town?” Lord Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, shifted his gaze from the couples whirling past on the dance floor and to the man who approached: the tall, fair, eminently good-looking Reginald Greville. He and Greville, his cousin, had once been the best of friends. However, time and distance had weakened the bond—with a little help from the war with France, Adrian thought bitterly. Ignoring Reginald’s question, he offered a somewhat rusty smile in greeting, then turned his gaze back to the men and women swinging elegantly about the dance floor. He replied instead, “Enjoying the season, Greville?” “Certainly, certainly. Fresh blood. Fresh faces.” “Fresh victims,” Mowbray said dryly, and Reginald laughed. “That too.” Reginald was well-known for his success in seducing young innocents. Only his title and money kept him from being forced out of town. Shaking his head, Adrian gave that rusty smile again. “I wonder you never tire of the chase, Reg. They all look sadly similar to me. I would swear these were the very same young women who were entering their first season the last time I attended…and the time before that, and the time before that.” His cousin smiled easily, but shook his head. “It has been ten years since you bothered to come to town, Adrian. Those women are all married and bearing fruit, or well on their way to spinsterhood.” “Different faces, same ladies,” Adrian said with a shrug. “Such cynicism!” Reg chided. “You sound old, old man.” “Older,” Adrian corrected. “Older and wiser.” “No. Just old,” Reg insisted with a laugh, his own gaze turning to the mass of people moving before them. “Besides, there are a couple of real lovelies this year. That blonde, for instance, or that brunette with Chalmsly.” “Hmmm.” Adrian looked the two women over. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is that the brunette—lovely as she is—doesn’t have a thought in her head. Rather like that Lady Penelope you seduced when last I was here.” Reg’s eyes widened in surprise at the observation. “And the blonde…” Adrian continued, his gaze raking the woman in question and taking in her calculating look. “Born of parents in trade, lots of money, and looking for a title to go with it. Rather like Lily Ainsley. Another of your conquests.” “Dead-on,” Reginald admitted, looking a bit incredulous. His gaze moved between the two women and then he gave a harsh laugh. “Now you have quite ruined it for me. I was considering favoring one or both of them with my attentions. But now you have made them quite boring.” -Reg & Adrian

During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the company’s third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of “less-developed country debt,” and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Musk’s boss wanted him to dig into the bank’s holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth. While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said. “This was like the biggest opportunity ever, and nobody seemed to realize it.” Musk tried to remain cool and calm as he rang Goldman Sachs, one of the main traders in this market, and probed around about what he had seen. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25-cents price. “The guy said, ‘How much do you want?’ and I came up with some ridiculous number like ten billion dollars,” Musk said. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. “I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer.” Musk had spent the summer earning about fourteen dollars an hour and getting chewed out for using the executive coffee machine, among other status infractions, and figured his moment to shine and make a big bonus had arrived. He sprinted up to his boss’s office and pitched the opportunity of a lifetime. “You can make billions of dollars for free,” he said. His boss told Musk to write up a report, which soon got passed up to the bank’s CEO, who promptly rejected the proposal, saying the bank had been burned on Brazilian and Argentinian debt before and didn’t want to mess with it again. “I tried to tell them that’s not the point,” Musk said. “The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” In

It was pleasant to see the Ladies Amelia and Alexandrina, as they sat within a vast emporium of carpets in Bond Street, asking questions of the four men who were waiting upon them, putting their heads together and whispering, calculating accurately as to extra twopences a yard, and occasioning as much trouble as it was possible for them to give. It was pleasant because they managed their large hoops cleverly among the huge rolls of carpets, because they were enjoying themselves thoroughly, and taking to themselves the homage of the men as clearly their due. But it was not so pleasant to look at Crosbie, who was fidgeting to get away to his office, to whom no power of choosing in the matter was really given, and whom the men regarded as being altogether supernumerary.

Become a 'game rearranger.' Cut the BS and WALK sharply in the TRUTH you can see...especially in calculated conversations which could be dangerous in their motive-operandi. Look and listen deeper into the spirit of your dialogues.

Grieving for their future, men and women often took their own lives. Others died when they could not maintain the feverish pace of the march. While the mortality rate of slaves during the Second Middle Passage never approached that of the transatlantic transfer, it surpassed the death rate of those who remained in the seaboard states. Over time some of the hazards of the long march abated, as slave traders - intent on the safe delivery of a valuable commodity - standardized their routes and relied more on flatboats, steamboats, and eventually railroads for transportation. The largest traders established 'jails,' where slaves could be warehoused, inspected, rehabilitated if necessary, and auctioned, sometimes to minor traders who served as middlemen in the expanding transcontinental enterprise. But while the rationalization of the slave trade may have reduced the slaves' mortality rate, it did nothing to mitigate the essential brutality or the profound alienation that accompanied separation from the physical and social moorings of home and family. ... [T]he Second Middle Passage was extraordinarily lonely, debilitating, and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one southward marching coffle, an observer characterized it as 'a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral.' Indeed, with men and women dying on the march or being sold and resold, slaves became not merely commodified but cut off from nearly every human attachment. Surrendering to despair, many deportees had difficulties establishing friendships or even maintaining old ones. After a while, some simply resigned themselves to their fate, turned inward, and became reclusive, trying to protect a shred of humanity in a circumstance that denied it. Others exhibited a sort of manic glee, singing loudly and laughing conspicuously to compensate for the sad fate that had befallen them. Yet others fell into a deep depression and determined to march no further. Charles Ball, like others caught in the tide, 'longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.' But many who survived the transcontinental trek formed strong bonds of friendships akin to those forged by shipmates on the voyage across the Atlantic. Indeed, the Second Middle Passage itself became a site for remaking African-American society. Mutual trust became a basis of resistance, which began almost simultaneously with the long march. Waiting for their first opportunity and calculating their chances carefully, a few slaves broke free and turned on their enslavers. Murder and mayhem made the Second Middle Passage almost as dangerous for traders as it was for slaves, which was why the men were chained tightly and guarded closely.

The Modus Operandi of THE REGULUS CONCLAVE as spelled out in 1853! “We hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point is, mutual interest, and under that; 1st, that we can govern this nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must, subvert its institutions; and, 3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond. Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralize the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our agents, we shall corrupt the State. “We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on ’Change we degrade commercial honor, and make success the idol. We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true protection to capital. “Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds, mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts, that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations, constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the equivalent for enormous prospective gains. “In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest, by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ’Change, we rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade; ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity. “We punish treachery by death!” (from YIEGER'S CABINET or SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM, published 1853)