Celebrating 1 Year In Business Quotes

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

For most of the past fifty years, the American sheeple think the U.S. has been fighting ground wars to protect them when it’s always been about protecting American business interests in foreign lands. Corporations not countries determine war and peace. Not that it matters; as long as the masses have their precious Facebook and their Hollywood celebrities telling them what to think, their world will go on.

My whole sorry existence has been building towards this one night. The night of the Reynolds’ Fortuna Ball. A celebration that invites the entire town to eat, drink, and dance the night away. It’s become tradition in these parts for the Reynolds family to hand over all the properties, businesses, offshore accounts, cars, and whatever else rich people own, to the heir on his twenty-fifth birthday. Nice, right? And the ball is their public way of celebrating the handover, or so everyone thinks. The truth is way weirder. Try an ancient curse; a deal signed in blood and a pair of families joined in perpetuity. The whole thing gives me the itches and I sound certifiable to boot, but for the last four hundred years the women in my family have been ripping off the Reynolds family, and those a**eholes throw us a party so we can do it in style.

FOR NEARLY five years, Oppenheimer had tried to use his prestige and status as a celebrity scientist to influence Washington’s growing national security establishment from the inside. His old friends on the left, men like Phil Morrison, Bob Serber and even his own brother had warned him that this was a futile gamble. He had failed in 1946, when the Acheson-Lilienthal plan for international control over atomic bombs was sabotaged by President Truman’s appointment of Bernard Baruch. And now, once again, he had failed to persuade the president and members of his Administration to turn their back on what Conant had described to Acheson as “the whole rotten business.” The Administration now supported a program to build a bomb 1,000 times as lethal as the Hiroshima weapon. Still, Oppenheimer would not “upset the applecart.” He would remain an insider— albeit one who was increasingly outspoken and increasingly suspect.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Autumn Psalm A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest) since I last noticed this same commotion. Who knew God was an abstract expressionist? I’m asking myself—the very question I asked last year, staring out at this array of racing colors, then set in motion by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay. Is this what people mean by speed of light? My usually levelheaded mulberry tree hurling arrows everywhere in sight— its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper my friends say I should do something about, whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper at the provocation of the upstart blue, the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper in savage competition with that red and blue— tohubohu returned, in living color. Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you? My attempted poem would lie fallow a year; I was so busy focusing on the desert’s stinginess with everything but rumor. No place even for the spectrum’s introverts— rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all— and certainly no room for shameless braggarts like the ones that barge in here every fall and make me feel like an unredeemed failure even more emphatically than usual. And here they are again, their fleet allure still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone; I’m through with it, want something fuller— why shouldn’t a person have a little fun, some utterly unnecessary extravagance? Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan when He set up (such things are never left to chance) that one split-second assignation with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision. You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there. Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation, there’s real resistance in the nearby air until the entire universe is swayed. Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen. He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade is actually a fairly detailed outline. David never needed one, but he’s long dead and God could use a little recognition. He promises. It won’t go to His head and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm! Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made. But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him, its palms and fingers crimson with applause, that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem, inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws, I came to talk about the way that violet-blue sprang the greens and reds and yellows into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true though I’m not sure I ever took it in. Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew into my field of vision, to realign that dazzle out my window yet again. It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open though I still wouldn’t be able to explain precisely what happened to these vines, these trees. It isn’t available in my tradition. For this, I would have to be Chinese, Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain, autumn rain converging on the trees, a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine, washerwomen heading home for the day, my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready. Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu! Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun! They’re suddenly hell-bent on learning Hebrew in order to get inside the celebration, which explains how they wound up where they are in my university library’s squashed domain. Poor guys, it was Hebrew they were looking for, but they ended up across the aisle from Yiddish— some Library of Congress cataloger’s sense of humor: the world’s calmest characters and its most skittish squinting at each other, head to head, all silently intoning some version of kaddish. Part 1

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.” On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

Spend less time dreaming about things you no longer have, and more on the dreams you can make right now. Find joy in living the life, and being the you that you are today. Don’t wait around to find yourself…or wait for the year that will bring you the “life you deserve.” Let life deserve all of you right now. Forget about the yesterdays when it was so easy to laugh; forget about the tomorrows that might bring you brighter days; smile for the todays and the moments you stand. Smile for the family you do have…even if it is just you. You may feel lonely, you may be all you have left…so look in the mirror and smile because you are worth smiling for…even when there is no one there to smile back. Find the wonder in the world. You might be living the ‘glory days’ right now, but missing them because you are too busy waiting for them to come in the future. Don’t wait to celebrate…because tomorrow might be too late. Take the opportunity to show all the eyes watching you that even when it hurts, you can still smile for them. Don’t let a moment pass when you don’t soak it all in. The world can be wonderful, even when it is hard. The trees might not look green from where you are standing…so find a way to take yourself to higher ground to get a different view. Take a leap and find joy as you soar…one smile at a time.

Three Best Ways to Start a Speech The third best way to start a speech is by using an ‘imagine’ scenario. ‘Imagine a big explosion as you climb up 3000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well, I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting on 1D.’ This is how Ric Elias started his TED talk—‘3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed’1—on the Hudson river landing. This true story was captured in an award-winning film, Sully, starring Tom Hanks. The second is to start with a statistic or factoid that shocks. Jamie Oliver, a British celebrity chef, restauranteur and activist who promotes healthy eating among children, started his TED Talk—‘Teach Every Child about Food’2—with ‘Sadly, in the next eighteen minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat.’ Given that the audience here was mainly American, there is no way that it didn’t get their attention. The absolutely best way to start a speech—no points for guessing—is with a story, one that is inextricably linked with the topic you are speaking on. ‘I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for her. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine

Business would be staying in California and celebrating a deal I’d worked a year on instead of rushing back to see you,” he finally said, his voice low and loaded with gravel. “Business would be completing my D.C. trip instead of waking my pilot up for a last-minute flight home. In all my years as CEO, I’ve only cut a work trip short twice, Vivian, and both those instances were because of you.” A wry twist of his lips. “So no, it’s not just fucking business anymore.