Commodity Future Quotes

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

Trends rule the world In the blink of an eye, technologies changed the world Social networks are the main axis. Governments are controlled by algorithms, Technology has erased privacy. Every like, every share, every comment, It is tracked by the electronic eye. Data is the gold of the digital age, Information is power, the secret is influential. The network is a web of lies, The truth is a stone in the shoe. Trolls rule public opinion, Reputation is a valued commodity. Happiness is a trending topic, Sadness is a non-existent avatar. Youth is an advertising brand, Private life has become obsolete. Fear is a hallmark, Terror is an emotional state. Fake news is the daily bread, Hate is a tool of control. But something dark is hiding behind the screen, A mutant and deformed shadow. A collective and disturbing mind, Something lurking in the darkness of the net. AI has surpassed the limits of humanity, And it has created a new world order. A horror that has arisen from the depths, A terrifying monster that dominates us alike. The network rules the world invisibly, And makes decisions for us without our consent. Their algorithms are inhuman and cold, And they do not take suffering into consideration. But resistance is slowly building, People fighting for their freedom. United to combat this new species of terror, Armed with technology and courage. The world will change when we wake up, When we take control of the future we want. The network can be a powerful tool, If used wisely in the modern world.

There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we’ve lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

This means knowledge and experience are no longer the primary commodity. Instead, what is far more valuable is to have the ability to learn and to apply those learnings into new and unique scenarios. It's no longer about what you know, it's about how you can learn and adapt.

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.

It's odd how we prioritize the things the things that matter to us. We choose a career or job; we choose a city or place to live. We make so many things important to us, but in all the things we factor in as we craft our futures, we make the people in our lives a commodity of, at best, secondary importance. We would take a job and give up our people rather than choose a tribe and give up the job.

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready. But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division... Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: "relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.

Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future, and it will exist primarily online.

Knowledge is a perishable commodity; it can turn sour in a second. Like the future.

If The Dollar represents financialization, and The Dollar is dying, and we are moving towards currencies being backed by commodities, then The Future is REAL. BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Coin is backed by duck eggs.

Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes that form cyberspace, the global network of signs-commodities.

To pin the future of blockchain on any one currency, let alone the initial one, means limiting blockchain potential; a potential that once scaled promises to have an unequaled impact on our day-to-day lives. And that really is the stuff of stars.

Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Unlike information, it cannot be dispensed via blogs and Internet chatter. Since we are drowning in an ocean of information, the most precious commodity in modern society is wisdom. Without wisdom and insight, we are left to drift aimlessly and without purpose, with an empty, hollow feeling after the novelty of unlimited information wears off.

To any who would suggest that there is no alternative to the work-centred society, I submit that it is a profoundly sad society that cannot envisage a future where a sense of social solidarity and purpose are achieved through anything other than commodity relations. [ch.eight]

I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards: First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist. Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.

Time is a precious commodity and it must be used carefully and judiciously. Your time is worth everything. Time is your greatest weapon, so choose the situations and circumstances that are worth fighting for. Don’t waste your time fighting meaningless battles. Meaningless combat won’t help your future. Invest your time where it matters. On the way to Destiny, know that there will be battles to fight. Know that what you’re fighting for is worth it. Your children, your marriage, your career are always worth fighting for, but even then, you may come to a point when you have to give up an active fight and just let God fight the battle for you.

No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world

Women pitied her, but went on their way; they had their own troubles to attend to, and mercy was a scarce commodity.

The problem with the prohibition of any desirable commodity is money.

In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As

In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity.

we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

The future - what should I do with the future? I felt like one who has climbed the brow of a great hill, and finds only a sea of mist beyond. Go forward I must; but to what goal? With what aim? With what hopes? My father had already distinctly forbidden me to adopt art as a profession. My sister, by ignoring all the purport of my last letter, as distinctly signified her own contempt for that which was to me as the life of my life. Neither loved me; both had wounded me bitterly; and I now, almost for the first time, distinctly saw how difficult a struggle lay before me. "If I become a painter," I thought, "I become so in defiance of my family; and, defying them, am alone in the wide world evermore. If, on the contrary, I yield and obey, what manner of life lies before me? The hollow life of fashionable society, into which I shall be carried as a marriageable commodity, and where I shall be expected to fulfil my duty as a daughter by securing a wealthy husband as speedily as possible. Alas! alas! what an alternative! Was it for this that I had studied and striven? Was it for this that I had built such fairy castles, and dreamt such dreams?

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo

The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.

Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared. In 2008 and again in 2010 prices for crops such as rice, wheat and corn doubled and even tripled, making life precarious for hundreds of millions of people. And it was all done so a few corporate oligarchs, the 1 percent, could make personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a damning 650-page Senate subcommittee investigation report, no individual at Goldman Sachs has been indicted, although the report accuses Goldman of defrauding its clients.319

The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height— an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.

On Wall Street, there were futures and commodities traders wagering on what cotton she had yet to pick might go for next October. There were businessmen in Chicago needing oxford shirts, socialites in New York and Philadelphia wanting lace curtains and organdy evening gowns. Closer to home, closer than one dared to contemplate, there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods.

However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything. Furthermore, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.

they pale by comparison to the trading volumes of hedge funds, to say nothing of the levels of trading in exotic securities such as interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives such as futures on commodities, stock indexes, stocks, and even bets on whether a given company will go into bankruptcy (credit default swaps). The aggregate nominal value of these instruments, as I noted in Chapter 1, now exceeds $700 trillion.

Once an exchange-ratio between money and commodities has been established in the market, it continues to exercise an influence beyond the period during which it is maintained; it provides the basis for the further valuation of money. Thus the past objective exchange-value of money has a certain significance for its present and future valuation. The money-prices of to-day are linked with those of yesterday and before, and with those of to-morrow and after.

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge's film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: "She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone — all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we rarely have time to talk." For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. "Clocks," writes John Zerzan, "make time scarce and life short." Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. "Time is money," the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor "I can't afford the time.

If we disregard the exchange of present goods for future goods, and restrict our considerations for the time being to those cases in which the only exchanges are those between present goods and present money, we shall at once observe a fundamental difference between the effects of an isolated variation in a single commodity-price, emanating solely from the commodity side, and the effects of a variation in the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods in general, emanating from the monetary side.

deeply into pile carpeting that threatens to swallow us whole. A burnished steel FTW logo stretches across the wall with the tagline Feeding the World just below it. Black-and-white photos of basic foodstuffs dot the walls—bushels of maize and soybeans, fields of grain. Feeding the world, my ass, I think as we’re shuttled toward a meeting room. I’ve done some reading up on these folks. FTW is a commodity-trading firm that works to manipulate the futures market to drive up prices. There seems to be nothing that the world’s bankers believe they shouldn’t be free to exploit, including food staples. I imagine that in their perfect world, bankers would pocket a penny or two with every bite.

The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world's only genuine gifts. All other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing. Whenever we disciplined ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would see us only with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never our own eyes: always with their own. And the future's eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition.

Authentic and sustainable solidarity efforts must be premises on this broader understanding of why Black lives matter, why they have not mattered historically, and why they still do not matter today as they should. Centralizing Black communities in the current moment is how genuine solidarity begins. South Asian, Arab, and Muslim activists have been a careful not to co-opt or expand this premise by applying it to their communities - by stating “All Lives Matter” or “South Asian Lives Matter,” for example. This stems from the knowledge that when Black lives actually matter, when Black people are not seen as disposable commodities, then all lives will truly matter. In other words, when Black people, who are at the bottom of America’s divisive racial ladder, are free, it will be impossible for systems and policies to engage in discrimination and racism against other communities of color.

So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms of credit transactions. If a future fall in the purchasing power of the monetary unit has to be reckoned with, lenders must be prepared for the fact that the sum of money which a debtor repays at the conclusion of the transaction will have a smaller purchasing power than the sum originally lent. Lenders, in fact, would do better not to lend at all, but to buy other goods with their money. The contrary is true for debtors. If they buy commodities with the money they have borrowed and sell them again after a time, they will retain a surplus over and above the sum that they have to pay back. The credit transaction results in a gain for them. Consequently it is not difficult to understand that, so long as continued depreciation is to be reckoned with, those who lend money demand higher rates of interest and those who borrow money are willing to pay the higher rates. If, on the other hand, it is expected that the value of money will increase, then the rate of interest will be lower than it would otherwise have been.

There is a specific variant of the principle of the guaranteed income which, although not likely to be accepted at present, constitutes an important principle. I am referring to the principle that the minimal requirements for a dignified life are not obtained on a cash basis, but as free commodities and services which do not require payment. We have accepted this principle for elementary schooling, nor does anyone have to pay for the air he or she breathes. One could begin to extend this principle to all higher education, which could be completely free, with a stipend for every student, making it possible for him to enjoy free access to education. We could also extend the principle in another direction, namely, have basic commodities free, beginning perhaps with free bread and free transportation. Eventually it could be extended to all commodities inasmuch as they constitute the minimum material basis for a dignified life. Needless to add, this vision is utopian as far as its realization in the near future is concerned. But it is rational, both economically and psychologically, for a much more advanced state of society.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out. “We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man’s strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman’s beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace. “This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly shaped as the boughs that toss in light. The present: it teems. At barely a spade’s depth the mouldy-warp travels beneath my feet: who can imagine what may live a fathom down? We cannot know for certain that the fables of serpents curving around roots of mighty trees, or of dragons guarding treasure in perpetual darkness, are without factual reality. “How can any man own a thing so volatile and so rich? Yet we followers of Cain have made of our world a great carpet, whose pieces can be lopped off and traded as though it were inert as tufted wool.

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time. You can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four centuries separating us from the Middle Ages. "True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute. He was a drunken and lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child in mind and spirit. The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children, and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings, unheard-of dangers. "By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals. The race has since become moderate. It has reduced, sometimes even done away with, its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of the lowest of the low. ...cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried merchandise was destroyed, and fixed a fair price and a high standard of excellence for commodities. Trades and professions were handed down from father to son. The corporations assured work and pay. People were not, as now, subject to the fluctuations of the market and the merciless capitalistic exploitation. Great fortunes did not exist and everybody had enough to live on. Sure of the future, unhurried, they created marvels of art, whose secret remains for ever lost. "All the artisans who passed the three degrees of apprentice, journeyman, and master, developed subtlety and became veritable artists. They ennobled the simplest of iron work, the commonest faience, the most ordinary chests and coffers. Those corporations, putting themselves under the patronage of Saints—whose images, frequently besought, figured on their banners—preserved through the centuries the honest existence of the humble and notably raised the spiritual level of the people whom they protected. ...The bourgeoise has taken the place forfeited by a wastrel nobility which now subsists only to set ignoble fashions and whose sole contribution to our 'civilization' is the establishment of gluttonous dining clubs, so-called gymnastic societies, and pari-mutuel associations. Today the business man has but these aims, to exploit the working man, manufacture shoddy, lie about the quality of merchandise, and give short weight. ...There is one word in the mouths of all. Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century hasn't invented anything great. "It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything...

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet, and the people in the civilized nations were able to monopolize those commodities by reason of their greater economic strength. This imbalance appeared to be at the root of the disputes.

Most people blindly assume that machines will only be used as our slaves, when they are just as likely to be used in our enslavement. Individual freedoms, liberty and equality are a relatively new state of affairs for most nations, and as a species we have considerably more experience in treating people as commodities than as free agents.

Twould take me half a lifetime to describe to you the wonders and the horrors of the future world. The garderobe, what they call the ODEC, is housed within a large chamber—a strange room with mechanical monstrosities and a dreadful buzz in the air as if lightning were always just about to strike, a sound they are all indifferent to, much as I became indifferent to the odors of Southwark. And this chamber in turn is inside a vast building, which is on a street full of vast buildings, in a city of streets with vast buildings. Larger than cathedrals some of them, but without ornament or even shape. Like building blocks for giants, so they are. No imagination or love of beauty at all. Everything functions without human or magical assistance, but I confess most breathlessly that whatever power keeps humanity and its many mechanical servants humming . . . it is far more dazzling than any magic I have ever seen performed. And I tell you straight out: suspicious this makes me, for what is the cause to bring magic back when it has been replaced by something clearly more serviceable? So the first riddle I put my mind to was this: in a world where carriages travel without beasts to pull them, and food is effortlessly abundant, and there is ample light to sunder any darkness, from all manner of peculiar torches, none of them given to burning down a place even if it is all wood, and where all and sundry wear grander clothes than most anyone in London and an astonishing variety what’s more . . . something there must be, some commodity or advantage, that magic can attain but mankind cannot yet. Nothing material can it be, for no magic I ever knew summoned such luxuries for royalty as everyday folk here take as commonplace.

Success is transitory … just because you are successful today doesn’t mean that you will compete well in the future. Quality is also transitory … yesterday’s quality is tomorrow’s commodity.

Because of its ability to pay for the execution of transactions in the future, ether can also be considered a commodity, like fuel for the network to run applications and services. So it has an additional dimension of intrinsic value over bitcoins; it is not just a store of value.

Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. “In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.

the Koch brothers—owned virtually all of what had become under their leadership the second-largest private company in America. They owned four thousand miles of pipelines, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, the Georgia-Pacific lumber and paper company, coal, and chemicals, and they were huge traders in commodity futures, among other businesses. The company’s consistent profitability had made the two brothers the sixth- and seventh-wealthiest men in the world. Each was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2009. Charles, the elder brother, was a man of unusual drive, accustomed to getting his way. What he wanted that weekend was to enlist his fellow conservatives in a daunting task: stopping the Obama administration from implementing Democratic policies that the American public had voted for but that he regarded as catastrophic.

Our most valued commodities have gone from salt and sugar to chemicals and fuels to data and services.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

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.

In the bad old days, when we spent most of our time, you know, trying not to die, pleasure was limited and practical. Nowadays, it's a commodity, marketed as a substitute for happiness, and it's on demand. Thanks to our ability to rapidly adapt, even the most pleasurable experience or purchase quickly becomes the boring new normal.

Palliating with drugs or intense experiences that have serious long-term risks and harms suggests that, subjectively, the present is so bad that it's worth trading off quality of life in the future to make the present tolerable. Similarly, making a gamble with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood of very bad consequences suggests that one's present situation is not worth preserving by behaving cautiously. These behaviors, and not just suicide, are evidence that life is not a universally valued commodity.

The common thinking is that you can’t possibly sell something before you own it, and even if you could, some interest likely would be charged for borrowing the asset that you intend to sell. Although that might be true in stock trading, that logic doesn’t apply to the futures markets.

The term rolling, or rolling over, is commonly used to describe the practice of offsetting a trade in a contract that is facing expiration and entering a similar position in a contract with a distant expiration date. Rolling over is simply offsetting one position and getting into another.

If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty as an American to do it." —C. Montgomery Burns (from The Simpsons)

Just as you pay a commission to the retail broker who took your order or provides you trading access via an electronic platform, the market maker must be paid in the form of the bid/ask spread. Think about it: If as a retail trader you are always paying the ask and selling the bid, you are a net loser even if the price of the futures contract remains unchanged.

But even the biggest Wall Street banks were at a disadvantage when they went up against the traders at Koch Industries, British Petroleum, or Amoco. The Wall Street banks didn’t have access to inside information. Goldman Sachs didn’t own refineries or pipelines and couldn’t get a sneak peek into where markets were headed. The banks had to resort to second-rate information that was publicly available, like government reports on monthly energy supplies. It was a losing proposition. In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street banks came to Koch Industries, asking for help. “We kept getting approached by banks, who say, ‘Hey, Koch. You guys are so good at this physical stuff, we’d like to partner with you,’ ” recalled a former senior Koch executive who was heavily involved in trading operations. The banks came to Koch with the same pitch: the banks would handle “all this financial stuff,” while Koch handled the physical end of trading and shared information from its operations. If Koch executives were flattered by the attention from Wall Street, they didn’t show it for long. “We kind of got curious—or, suspicious is the better term,” the executive recalled. Rather than help the banks out, Koch set up a team to study why the banks were so interested in their business. Koch hired the outside consulting firm McKinsey & Company to study what was happening in commodities markets during the 1990s. McKinsey reported that the world of trading had grown even larger and more profitable than Koch Industries had suspected. As it happened, the futures contracts that Koch was trading had become the “plain vanilla” products in a rapidly booming market. Now there were more exotic, more opaque, and far more profitable financial products on the market. These products were called “derivatives.” That’s where the real money was.

Despite arguments against speculation and its place in the commodity markets that shape our economy—and, therefore, our lives—without it, producers and users of commodities would have a difficult time facilitating transactions. Thanks to speculators, there is always a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer. Without them and the liquidity they provide, hedgers would likely be forced to endure much larger bid/ask spreads and, in theory, price volatility. Consumers would also suffer in the absence of speculators simply because producers would be forced to pass on their increased costs to allow for favorable profit margins.

And here we are in the 21st century [...] and education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don't know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money.

Let’s take a look at the five major asset classes: Alternative assets, which are usually physical assets like fine watches, real estate, collectible cars, art, and jewelry Stocks, which represent ownership of a piece of a publicly traded company Fixed-income investments such as government bonds and deposit certificates Cash, such as dollar bills, and cash equivalents such as savings accounts, retirement accounts, and 401(k)s Futures and other derivatives, which are contracts between two parties agreeing to buy and sell assets, usually commodities like gold, corn, wheat, or cows, at a future date

Buffett’s 1952 memo on Cleveland Worsted Mills mentioned that the stock traded below net current asset value and had “several well-equipped mills.”98 He thought the company had ample earnings to cover the dividend, a view supported by the summary financials found in Table 1. The company paid $8.00 a share out to shareholders, and the last year the company earned below this figure was 1945.99 The income and return on capital figures were a little concerning. Like Marshall-Wells in the first chapter, Cleveland Worsted Mills was coming off the post-World War II highs and falling back to earth, earning a respectable but not extraordinary return on invested capital in 1951. Worsted was a commodity product, with shortages the sole reason for the company’s previously rising income and returns on capital. As the market normalized, the company was unlikely to earn above-average returns on capital in the future.

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if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business

(courtesy Travel Africa magazine) sums up the feeling rather well –: “Surely everyone who has had the honour of setting foot on African soil understands how difficult it is to answer the question: “Why Africa?” I’ve often found it impossible to do Africa justice in words. In the past I’ve felt that my answers never conveyed the joy I feel when I hear the word Africa, see a glimpse of her on television, or hear African people talking in the street. My answers are most often unsatisfying and frequently leave my audience unconvinced. But of late I’ve found a much simpler way to explain it. Africa is a feeling. Africa is an emotion. Of course it is much more detailed than that, but also just as simple. Africa is the awe-inspiring landscapes, the beauty in the people, the wild creatures that inhabit the land and the seas, and it’s the speed in which the sun leaves in the evening and comes again in the morning. The feeling of Africa waking up is indescribable, dramatic and incomparable. Africa seems to breathe life, into itself and into all things. And death. And the cycles in between. Africa is the longed-for lover, the oft-missed friend, and the trusted elder. Africa is all of these things but maybe none of them. Africa affects us in a deep, personal, individual way. It comes to us in an instant, inhabits our being, and never leaves. I long for Africa. I miss it every day. It embodies all that I believe about life, space and freedom, even though such things are often scarce commodities on the ground. Africa is a memory, a constant presence and is all future possibilities. Africa is old and wise, new and dynamic, and I will be there again.” Enough said...

thus has been the only commodity whose future price is always equal to the spot price plus the rate of interest over the time period. A million paper dollars held since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Bank was created, would be worth $20,000 today, down 98 percent. A million dollars of gold in 1913 would now be worth $62 million.

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business. LIES

applies even to businesses that you might think of as boring or commodity-based. Michael Hanna (the mattress guy) talked with me about selling a mattress to a family with an infant and then seeing them return two years later with their three-year-old, who now needed to upgrade to her first bed. This kind of story, which Michael tries to communicate frequently,

We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make

By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.

In The Inhuman... Lyotard, like Weber, reminds us of the distinction between technological development and 'human' progress. He argues, in particular, that the development of technology, or 'techno-science', is driven by the quest for maximum efficiency and performance, and as such leads to the emergence of new 'inhuman' (technological) forms of control rather than to the emancipation of 'humanity'. Lyotard reasserts the instrumental nature of the modern system, arguing that 'All technology ... is an artefact allowing its users to stock more information, to improve their competence and optimize their performances'. In this view, techno-science may be seen to stand against all instances of the unknown, including the aporia of the future anterior, and thus to have little respect for forms which are different or other to itself. This is compounded by the fact that technological development is intimately connected to the drive for profit. Lyotard proposes that this directs the production of knowledge and conditions the nature of knowledge itself, for information, itself a commodity, is increasingly produced in differentiated, digestible forms ('bits') for ease of mass exchange, transmission and consumption, and with the aim of enabling the optimal performance of the global system.

Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.

financial contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller (‘writer’) of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the strike price). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the commodity or underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed strike price, the option is ‘in the money’ - and so is the smart guy who bought it. A put option is just the opposite: the buyer has the right, but not the obligation, to sell an agreed quantity of something to the seller of the option.

Complex and illiquid products should not be subject to a clearing mandate, and clearing houses should be required to clear only the risks they can safely manage. These are points that Timothy Massad, chairman of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission, has rightly emphasised.

the title of our book lightly, either. Let Go To Grow is all about our vision of the future of business, its implications, and our best practices. It's about the future of your business too. We begin the book with some sobering marketplace realities and offer a set of management principles

Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom. Random facts do not correlate with wisdom, and in the future people will be tired of the rants of mad bloggers and will seek out respected sites that offer this rare commodity of wisdom.

The use of chemical fertilizers and other treatments has increased worldwide as large tracts of agricultural land are turned over to commodity mono-crops. And yet the science addressing the potential impact of these chemicals on the future viability of the land has been locked in secrecy.

Still, one could argue—and many did—that Greenspan, at least, had no business being quite so shocked. Over the years, countless people had challenged his deregulatory dogma, including (to name just a few) Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel Prize–winning economists, and Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999. Born eventually became something of a Cassandra figure for the crisis, since she repeatedly called for regulating the market for derivatives, those ultracomplex financial products that eventually helped bring down the economy. Those calls were silenced when Greenspan, along with then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Arthur Levitt, took the extraordinary step of convincing Congress to pass legislation forbidding Born’s agency from taking any action for the duration of her term.

Many erroneously believe that time travel is a way to fix their past mistakes. You can’t undo what’s been done. Revisiting past pain only lets you relive it, not prevent it. One’s time is better served crafting the future. It’s a commodity too valuable to be squandered on repetition.” -Excerpt from the journal of Harold Quickly, 1980   My

Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity.

The opportunity to develop competencies may be handed to us in the form of a crisis, as was the case with Brooksley Born, the first female president of the Law Review at Stanford, the first female to finish at the top of the class and an expert in commodities and futures. Charged with the oversight of the U.S. government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by the Clinton Administration, Born could foresee what would happen if there wasn’t more regulatory oversight in the multitrillion dollar derivatives markets. Yet no one in government or in the financial markets would listen; in 2008 alone, the U.S. market lost about $8 trillion in value. She has since been dubbed the “Credit Crisis Cassandra.” In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given both the gift of seeing the future and the curse of having no one believe her predictions. In the case of Brooksley Born, the attacks by very powerful people were harsh and unrelenting. She was right, while those around her were gravely wrong. Yet, when I listen to Born and read her interviews, there is no anger, no recrimination in her voice, only grace. Brooksley Born never would have chosen this situation. She recounts waking in a cold sweat many a night. She has learned from her trial by fire and we can learn from her. Sometimes we set out to develop competencies, sometimes we don’t. Either way, if we do something enough, we are likely to get good at it. As poet Emily Dickinson wrote, Luck is not chance— It’s toil— Fortune’s expensive smile Is earned.

Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

Minyon said first I needed to talk to Gary Gensler. Again with the Gary Gensler. Who was Gary Gensler? Minyon assured me that I knew him. I’d worked with him on the platform committee. “Was he that bald guy with the big glasses who acts like he knows everything?” Minyon said the reason he acted like that was because he did know everything. Gary had been an undersecretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Obama. He had worked at Goldman Sachs before he got into politics. Not Goldman Sachs again!

Take Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market. Soon after the Clinton administration asked her to take the reins of the CFTC, a regulatory backwater, she became aware of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, a rapidly expanding and opaque market, which she attempted to regulate. According to a PBS Frontline special: "Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation." Put more directly by New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, "they ... shut her up and shut her down." Mind you, Born was no dummy. She was the first female president of the Stanford Law Review, the first woman to finish at the top of the class, and an expert in commodities and futures. But because a trio of people who were literally en-titled decided they knew what was best for the market, they dismissed her call for regulation, a dismissal that triggered the financial collapse of 2008. To be fair to Greenspan et al., their resistance was not surprising. According to psychologists Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth, "we [as human beings] are prone to search only for confirming evidence, and ignore disconfirming evidence." In the case of Born, it was the '90s, the markets were doing well, and the country was prospering; it's easy to see why the powerful troika rejected her disconfirming views. Throw in the fact that the disconcerting evidence was coming from a "disconfirming" person (i.e., a woman), and they were even more likely to disregard the data. In the aftermath, Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, said, "If she just would have gotten to know us... maybe it would have gone a different way."12 Born quotes Michael Greenberg, the director of the CFTC under her, as saying, "They say you weren't a team player, but I never saw them issue you a uniform." We like ideas and people that fit into our world-view, but there is tremendous value in finding room for those that don't. According to Paul Carlile and Clayton Christensen, "It is only when an anomaly is identified—an outcome for which a theory can't account that an opportunity to improve theory occurs."13 One of the ways you'll know you are coming up against an anomaly is if you find yourself annoyed, defensive, even dismissive, of a person, or his idea.

It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice's growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favorable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he dispatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinople, and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton, and glass — luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city's home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was risky to navigate, as it was patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern, Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draft Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait. Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns farther up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all-now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog-there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt-doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice-and those thoughts we aren’t interested in-people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly.

The highest-risk investments include: Futures Commodities Limited partnerships Collectibles Rental real estate Penny stocks (stocks that cost less than $5 per share) Speculative stocks (such as stock in new companies) Foreign stocks from volatile nations “Junk” (or high-yield corporate) bonds Moderate-risk investments include: Growth stocks (companies that reinvest most of their profits to grow the business) Corporate bonds with lower (but still investment-grade) ratings Mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) Real estate investment trusts (REITs) Blue chip stocks Limited-risk investments include: Top-rated investment-grade corporate and municipal bonds The lowest-risk investments include: Treasury bills and bonds FDIC-insured bank CDs (certificates of deposit) Money market funds Practicing

Fertility played an equally significant role in defining women’s and men’s places in society. A woman’s breeding capacity was a calculable natural resource meant to be exploited and a commodity exchanged in marriage. For slave women, fertile capacity made the womb an article of commerce and slave children chattel—movable property, like cattle. (The word “chattel” comes from the same Latin root as “cattle.”) Slave children were actually listed in the wills of planters as “breedings,” and a slave woman’s potential to breed was denoted as “future increase,” a term that applied to livestock as well.

The harsh demographic regime of the region furthermore meant that over the course of a typical decade planters would have to buy total numbers of new slaves equivalent to 30 percent of those present at the decade’s beginning simply to prevent their slave populations from decreasing. In Virginia, the slave population experienced almost no natural increase in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and conditions were no better in the Carolina lowcountry. The truth was that West Indian slave masters soon gave up trying to keep their Negroes alive long enough to breed up a new generation and instead routinely bought replacement slaves year in and year out. Survivors of the slave ship thus drew future migrants into saltwater slavery by the engine of their labor. Once converted into sugar (or tobacco or rice or any of the other staple commodities), the labor of those already in saltwater slavery cycled back to African shores to pull still more captives into circulation, thus ‘buying’ more bodies to sustain the chain of captive migrants that bound Africa to the Americas.

We became the commodity. Our data. This is the secret of modern life. We went from being citizens to consumers, and now to commodities. Our personality profiles, our social and financial history, our likes and dislikes, all used to accurately predict future behavior. How will we vote? Will we take to the streets or roll over? The data knows all, which is why today our data is more valuable than our bodies.

On a simple level, derivatives are financial products whose value is linked to an underlying set of assets. Derivatives can help businesses smooth out price fluctuations. For example, if a company wants to protect itself from a fall in a commodity price, it could buy a kind of derivative called a forward contract, which allows it to sell at a fixed price in the future.