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So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
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René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind)
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By embracing a holistic approach to risk management and conducting regular risk assessments, board members can ensure that their company is prepared to face a wide range of challenges
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
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Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
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When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted. This situation places a survivor who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek the satisfaction of mobilized needs through some "illegitimate" source that leaves her increasingly divided from herself and ostracized from others.
While meeting needs in this way resolves the immediate existential experience of deprivation and abandonment. it produces numerous other difficulties. These include experiencing oneself as “bad” or "weak" for having such strong needs; experiencing shame and guilt for relying on “illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the continued abuse and victimization of perpetrators who are all too willing to selfishly use others for their own pleasure and purposes under the guise of being 'helpful.
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J. Jeffrey Means
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dairy intake is “one of the most consistent dietary predictors for prostate cancer in the published literature,” and those who consume the most dairy have double to quadruple the risk.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [. . .] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence.
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George Bernard Shaw (Saint Joan)
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So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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Nuclear weapons made global warfare of the twentieth century variety too costly to conduct. But cyber weapons make far more likely an era of nearly permanent or persistent conflict that seeks to degrade rather than destroy enemies, and to do so at a distance, behind cover of anonymity, with few if any human assets at risk. In a hundred years we may have gone from the war to end all wars to the war that never ends.
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David Rothkopf (National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear)
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In one study of ten countries,14 a higher consumption of calcium was associated with a higher—not lower—risk of bone fracture (Chart 10.3
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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Heroism can be defined as having four key features: (a) it must be engaged in voluntarily; (b) it must involve a risk or potential sacrifice, such as the threat of death, an immediate threat to physical integrity, a long-term threat to health, or the potential for serious degradation of one’s quality of life; (c) it must be conducted in service to one or more other people or the community as a whole; and(d) it must be without secondary, extrinsic gain anticipated at the time of the act. Heroism in service of a noble idea is usually not as dramatic as
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Philip G. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil)
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It was almost a direct reversal of the old rules of conduct, under which a woman had to remain virginal or risk being cast out of society. Nowadays young women were apparently supposed to count being a sexual dynamo among their accomplishments—a far riskier avocation than embroidery or playing the harp.
From damned if you do to damned if you don’t: the story of women’s lives
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Amanda Sellet (By the Book)
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These studies showed that people who migrated from one area to another and who started eating the typical diet of their new residency assumed the disease risk of the area to which they moved.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.
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Gilbert du Motier
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longitudinal study of people over age 75, conducted over a period of 21 years by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at whether activities from playing cards to swimming to doing housework affected cognitive ability. Almost none of the physical activities had any effect on dementia rates except for one: partner dancing, which lowered the risk by 76 percent. No other activity came anywhere near being as effective at protecting people from cognitive decline!3
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Christiane Northrup (Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being)
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One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas of the brain that control emotions (but with intact logic and cognitive functions) to the investment decisions made by a control group. The brain-damaged investors finished the game with 13 percent more money than the control group, largely, the authors believe, because they do not experience fear and anxiety. The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science)
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men with the highest dairy intakes had approximately double the risk of total prostate cancer,
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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Reviewing the 6 meltdowns that had occurred in the 54 trials that had been conducted to date, that source estimated the risk to be one in a hundred million.
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John Gall (SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE)
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Speak up or risk becoming background noise.
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April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
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Unusual markets often provide the clearest insight into how risk is assessed, bought, and sold. Because nothing is hidden in markets like sex work, the subtleties that exist in all markets are made obvious. This is why we can learn the most by studying how business is conducted at the edges of the economy and apply that knowledge to more typical economic transactions.
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Allison Schrager (An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk)
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While tracking trends can be a useful tool in dealing with the unpredictable future, market research can be more of a problem than a help. Research does best at measuring the past. New ideas and concepts are almost impossible to measure. No one has a frame of reference. People don’t know what they will do until they face an actual decision.
The classic example is the research conducted before Xerox introduced the plain-paper copier. What came back was the conclusion that no one would pay five cents for a plain-paper copy when they could get a Thermofax copy for a cent and a half. Xerox ignored the research, and the rest is history.
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Al Ries (The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk)
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What’s ensued is a battle over ethical conduct, artistic freedom, and censorship in which every side—the activist zealots who threatened violence, the shock-tactic artists, and the controversy-courting, then risk-averse museum—has come out a loser.
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Andrea K. Scott
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The solution to losing weight is a whole foods, plant-based diet, coupled with a reasonable amount of exercise. It is a long-term lifestyle change, rather than a quick-fix fad, and it can provide sustained weight loss while minimizing risk of chronic disease.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...
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Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
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Those who dared criticize Serra and his Franciscans for their treatment of the Native Americans risked being crushed by the power of the Roman Catholic Church, with its power of excommunication, or being literally torn to pieces by the Inquisition, which could conduct an investigation using horrendous means of torture against anyone who dared challenge the church or its hierarchy.
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Elias Castillo (A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions)
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Friendship is a crucible of positive and negative feelings that are in a permanent state of ebullition. There’s an expression: with friends God is watching me, with enemies I watch myself. In the end, an enemy is the fruit of an oversimplification of human complexity: the inimical relationship is always clear, I know that I have to protect myself, I have to attack. On the other hand, God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbor rancor, trickery, and betrayal. Perhaps that’s why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the serious consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.
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Elena Ferrante
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The much later age of menarche in rural China is remarkable. Twenty-five women in each of the 130 villages in the survey were asked when they had their first menstrual period. The range of village averages was fifteen to nineteen years, with an average of seventeen years. The U.S. average is roughly eleven years! Many studies have shown that earlier menarche leads to higher risk for breast cancer.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior. Reason is in the service of this freedom, in a purely instrumental way; it is a person’s capacity to calculate the best means to satisfy his ends. About the ends themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual. To do otherwise would be to risk lapsing into paternalism. Thus does liberal agnosticism about the human good line up with the market ideal of “choice.” We invoke the latter as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy.
This mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom and rationality provides the basic framework for the discipline of economics, and for “liberal theory” in departments of political science. It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful.
But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face.
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Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction)
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1) The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2) At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3) He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4) He is verbally abusive. 5) He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6) He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7) He has battered in prior relationships. 8) He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9) He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10) His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11) There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12) He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13) He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14) He refuses to accept rejection. 15) He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16) He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17) He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18) He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19) He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20) He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21) He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22) He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23) He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24) He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25) He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26) He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27) Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28) He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29) He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30) His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians.
In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.
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Daniel Waterman (Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility)
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At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can't think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have - the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.
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Julia May Jonas (Vladimir)
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Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
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Henry Kissinger (World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History)
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A 2013 study conducted by the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia found that the risk of levying a negative attack is well worth the reward, as any negative blowback on the person launching the attack tends to dissipate while the attack takes effect. “For voters who react with disdain toward the candidate (whether or not a defensive message follows), a sleeper effect is likely to occur,” the study said. “That is, the overtime impact of the negative attack increases.
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Amanda Carpenter (Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us)
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Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently.
At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein.
Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms:
1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...]
2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...]
3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.
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James Montier (The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy)
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Women also engage in aggression, and their victims are also typically members of their own sex. In studies of verbal aggression through derogation of competitors, for example, women slander the physical appearance of their rivals (Buss & Dedden, 1990; Campbell, 1993, 1999). In the modern world of the internet, women are more likely than men to denigrate and cyber-bully other women by commenting negatively about their physical appearance and promiscuous sexual conduct (Wyckoff et al., in press). The forms of aggression committed by women, however, are typically less violent and hence less risky than those committed by men—facts that are accounted for by the theory of parental investment and sexual selection (see Campbell, 1995). Indeed, selection may operate against women who take the large physical risks entailed by aggression. Evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell argues that women need to place a higher value on their own lives than do men on theirs, given the fact that infants depend on maternal care more than on paternal care (Campbell, 1999). Women’s evolved psychology, therefore, should reflect greater fearfulness of situations that pose a physical threat of bodily injury—a prediction that is well supported by the empirical findings (Campbell, 1999, 2002).
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David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
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Dystopia is not always an unhappy place. There are, as it happens, certain dystopias in which it's perfectly possible to be happy as a clam. Vast numbers of people go through life never even realizing that they're in one, might live through the real-time decay from freedom to tyranny and never notice the change.
It basically comes down to wanderlust.
Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs: No Trespassing, Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill. These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers-- but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.
Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.
How you react-- whether you even notice-- depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, would never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all, *their* lives haven't changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.
For the rest of us, though, it's only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you've always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.
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Peter Watts (Beyond the Rift)
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In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’21 Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most.
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Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences)
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In the fuel’s diluted state, and without the possibility of contact with water, the scientists concluded there was limited risk of another explosion. By 1996, however, things had changed. Condensation and water had entered the Sarcophagus via its many holes and seeped down into the solidified fuel-lava. It reacted with the uranium within, causing a surge in radioactivity. The Sarcophagus was ten years old at that stage, and an estimated 70% probability of collapse within the subsequent decade meant money was redirected away from research and towards engineering. This dangerous situation ultimately resulted in the Designed Stabilisation Steel Structure mentioned in Chapter 5. Research conducted into the corium has since been insubstantial.
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
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If we don’t accept that the nature of a regime shapes its conduct, we risk profoundly misreading international politics. We expect better behavior from despots than we have reason to. We miss what can be the most transformational force for good in the world: the anger of oppressed people, and their hope, their imperishable hope for change. That anger and hope filled the streets of East Berlin twenty-nine years ago, tore down a wall separating half a continent from liberty, and made the United States and our allies a whole lot safer. A world where the human rights of more people in more places are secure is not only a more just world, it’s a safer world. For reasons of basic self-interest we must continue to lead the long, patient effort to make the world freer and more just.
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John McCain (The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations)
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By 2011, enough data had been accumulated to show that some risk existed due to long-term, heavy use of mobile phones, compelling the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, to classify mobile cell phone radiation in the Group 2B category, indicating a possible carcinogen (a substance or source of exposure that can cause cancer).14 This is the same category as DDT, lead, engine exhaust, chloroform, and glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup®). Later, in 2016, a $25 million study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institutes of Health, confirmed what many have believed for years—that exposure to EMF radiation emitted from cell phones can lead to serious health issues including brain and heart tumors.
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Daniel T. DeBaun (Radiation Nation: Complete Guide to EMF Protection & Safety - The Proven Health Risks of EMF Radiation & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself & Family)
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In my opinion, there is nothing more unbecoming in the human type than its indecent habit of sleeping with the mouth open. Never in a lifetime would a cat be caught in such degenerate conduct. The mouth and the nose have their separate functions: the former is provided for the making of sounds and the latter for respiratory purposes. However, in northern lands the human creature has grown slothful and opens its mouth as seldom and as little as possible. One obvious result of this muscular parsimony is the northern style of tight-lipped speech in which the words would seem to be enunciated through the nostrils. That is bad, but it's even worse when the nose is kept closed and the mouth assumes the respiratory function. The result is not only unsightly, but could indeed, when rat shit drops from the rafters, involve real risk to health.
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Natsume Sōseki (I Am a Cat)
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Before the troops left Rome, the consul Varro made a number of extremely arrogant speeches. The nobles, he complained, were directly responsible for the war on Italian soil, and it would continue to prey upon the country's vitals if there were any more commanders on the Fabian model. He himself, on the contrary, would bring it to an end on the day he first caught sight of the enemy. His colleague Paullus spoke only once before the army marched, and in words which though true were hardly popular. His only harsh criticism of Varro was to express his surprise about how any army commander, while still at Rome, in his civilian clothes, could possibly know what his task on the field of battle would be, before he had become acquainted either with his own troops or the enemy's or had any idea of the lie and nature of the country where he was to operate--or how he could prophesy exactly when a pitched battle would occur. As for himself, he refused to recommend any sort of policy prematurely; for policy was moulded by circumstance, not circumstance by policy. . . . [T]o strengthen [Paullus'] determination Fabius (we are told) spoke to him at his departure in the following words.
'If, Lucius Aemilius, you were like your colleague, or if--which I should much prefer--you had a colleague like yourself, anything I could now say would be superfluous. Two good consuls would serve the country well in virtue of their own sense of honour, without any words from me; and two bad consuls would not accept my advice, nor even listen to me. But as things are, I know your colleague's qualities and I know your own, so it is to you alone I address myself, understanding as I do that all your courage and patriotism will be in vain, if our country must limp on one sound leg and one lame one. With the two of you equal in command, bad counsels will be backed by the same legal authority as good ones; for you are wrong, Paullus, if you think to find less opposition from Varro than from Hannibal. Hannibal is your enemy, Varro your rival, but I hardly know which will prove the more hostile to your designs; with the former you will be contending only on the field of battle, but with the latter everywhere and always. . . .
[I]t is not the enemy who will make it difficult and dangerous for you to tread, but your fellow-countrymen. Your own men will want precisely what the enemy wants; the wishes of Varro, the Roman consul, will play straight into the hands of Hannibal, commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian armies. You will have two generals against you; but you will stand firm against both, if you can steel yourself to ignore the tongues of men who will defame you--if you remain unmoved by the empty glory your colleague seeks and the false infamy he tries to bring upon yourself. . . . Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise. Hannibal will despise a reckless antagonist, but he will fear a cautious one. Not that I wish you to do nothing--all I want is that your actions should be guided by a reasoned policy, all risks avoided; that the conduct of the war should be controlled by you at all times; that you should neither lay aside your sword nor relax your vigilance but seize the opportunity that offers, while never giving the enemy a chance to take you at a disadvantage. Go slowly, and all will be clear and sure. Haste is always improvident and blind.
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Livy (The History of Rome, Books 21-30: The War with Hannibal)
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In 2021 the respected journal Nature Medicine published a peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled trial on psychedelic assisted treatment of trauma. The results were impressive. With just three, medically supervised sessions using MDMA, 67 per cent no longer had PTSD – more than double the placebo group. There was no increased risk of abuse and, crucially, those with dissociation responded as well as those without.3 Given the special skills otherwise required to navigate dissociation, this latter finding was a big deal. There are currently over a hundred psychedelic-assisted therapy trials being conducted worldwide. It would appear that these drugs allow a resetting of a part of the brain known as the ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN) that otherwise holds on to recurring, distressing thoughts – especially around guilt and shame. During REM/dreaming sleep the DMN fires up, but the normal resetting process fails with overwhelming trauma.
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Jeni Haynes (The Girl in the Green Dress)
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So, these competitors . . . What do they hope to gain by interfering with your journey?” The instant the question left his mouth, he knew it was too direct. Nicole dropped her gaze and removed her hand from his arm. “With all due respect, Mr. Thornton . . .” Drat. They were back to Mr. Thornton again. “ . . . the details of the business I’m conducting for my father are not your concern.” “They are if they put you in danger. And what of the rest of my staff?” Darius snatched the napkin from his lap and threw it onto the table before lurching to his feet and pacing behind his chair. “I have a right to know if having you here is putting them at risk.” “No greater risk than they face from your exploding boilers!” Nicole shot from her seat, color running high in her cheeks. The audacity of the chit. “I take every precaution—” “As do I.” She glared at him. “The Wellborns are in no peril, especially if they keep my presence here a secret. It’s doubtful that Jenkins’s sons will find me, anyway. Heaven knows they aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer.” “As master of this house, it’s my duty to know the business of those under my roof.” He didn’t know what nonsense he was spouting now. He didn’t care. Nicole had let a vital piece of information slip in her anger, and he wasn’t about to let the argument cool long enough for her to notice her lapse. “Well, perhaps it’s time I collect the pay I’ve earned and leave you and your roof to your own devices.” Not on her life. The woman would be unprotected. Vulnerable. Easy prey for that Jenkins scum. But he couldn’t let her know his refusal was out of concern for her. She’d simply assure him she’d be fine and walk out the door. Darius crossed his arms over his chest and looked down his nose at her. “You agreed to accept payment after a term of two weeks. I’ll not pay a cent before then. You owe me ten more days, Miss Greyson. Or do you plan to renege on our agreement?” Her hands fisted at her sides. “I never go back on my word.
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Karen Witemeyer (Full Steam Ahead)
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I always think those people fortunate who are content to stand, without question, by the ten commandments, knowing exactly how to conduct themselves, and propped up by the hope of Paradise on the one hand, and by the fear of a cloven-footed devil with pincers, on the other.... But we who answer Why to the crude Thou Shalt Not, are like sailors on a wintry sea without a compass. Reason and instinct say one thing, and convention says another. But the worst of it is that one's conscience has been reared on the Decalogue, and fostered on hell-fire—and one's conscience has the last word. I dare say it's cowardly, but it's certainly discreet, to take it into consideration. It's like lobster salad; it's not actually immoral to eat it, but it will very likely give you indigestion.... One has to be very sure of oneself to go against the ordinary view of things; and if one isn't, perhaps it's better not to run any risks, but just to walk along the same secure old road as the common herd. It's not exhilarating, it's not brave, and it's rather dull; but it's eminently safe.
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W. Somerset Maugham
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Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads.
Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.
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Ilan Pappé (The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories)
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with his daughter.” “Incest?” Rainie looked at Quincy incredulously. “Jesus, SupSpAg, how do you sleep with that mind?” “I can’t be sure,” Quincy said modestly, “but it has all the classic signs. Domineering father alone with his young daughter for the first thirteen years of her life. Seems very doting on the outside. I’m sure if you conducted further interviews you’d find plenty of neighbors and teachers telling you how ‘close’ Mr. Avalon and his daughter were. How ‘involved’ he was in her life. But then she hits puberty and the jig is up. To continue risks pregnancy, plus she’s starting to get a woman’s body, and many of these men aren’t interested in that. So Mr. Avalon goes ahead and takes a wife, some poor, passive woman to serve as window dressing and help him appear suitable to the outside world. Now he clings to the fantasy of what he once had. And protects it jealously.” “Does Mr. Avalon have access to a computer?” Rainie asked Luke. “In his office.” She turned to Quincy. “If Mr. Avalon was involved with his daughter, would he have problems with her relationship with VanderZanden?” “He’ll have problems with any of her relationships. In his mind, she’s his.” “That’s it then. He found out, got angry—” “And got an alibi,” Luke interrupted flatly. They looked at him sharply. He was nearly apologetic. “I tried, Rainie. I stayed in town till eleven last night trying to break this guy’s story. I’ve probably pissed off every blue blood in the city and it still holds. Mr. Avalon was in a business meeting all day Tuesday. His secretary swears
”
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Lisa Gardner (The Third Victim (Quincy & Rainie, #2))
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The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.
Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls.
The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society. Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress. Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead. "Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey. It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.
”
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Emma Goldman (Anarchism and other essays (Illustrated))
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Oddly, someone who has actually been charged with a crime is entitled to the appointment of counsel in civil forfeiture proceedings, but those whose property has been forfeited but whose conduct did not merit criminal charges are on their own. This helps to explain why up to 90 percent of forfeiture cases in some jurisdictions are not challenged. Most people simply cannot afford the considerable cost of hiring an attorney. Even if the cost is not an issue, the incentives are all wrong. If the police seized your car worth $5,000, or took $500 cash from your home, would you be willing to pay an attorney more than your assets are worth to get them back? If you haven't been charged with a crime, are you willing to risk the possibility that fighting the forfeiture might prompt the government to file criminal charges against you?
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Why are pig farmers particularly likely to have their appendix removed? In 1991, a Finnish scientist called Markku Seiru conducted a fascinating study into pig farmers and abattoir workers in Finland, comparing the rate of appendectomies within this group with that of the general population. The study found that pig farmers were around two and a half times more likely to have their appendix removed than other Finns, while abattoir workers were almost four times more likely to have an appendectomy. But why, you may wonder, should working with pigs carry such a bizarre and specific risk?
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David Haviland (How to Remove a Brain: and Other Bizarre Medical Practices and Procedures)
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Bodies were piling up too fast in some places for medical examiners and coroners to keep up. Morgues were filled to capacity, and corpses had to be stored for days in rented refrigerated tractor-trailers until space became available. Many of the dead were not autopsied. It is standard procedure in a drug-overdose case to conduct an autopsy. But even if medical examiners had had time to autopsy every victim, some stopped themselves from doing so. Professional groups that accredit medical examiners set a limit on the number of autopsies that a doctor can competently perform in a year, and examiners in areas with large numbers of overdose deaths would have exceeded that number and risked losing their accreditation. As a result, when overdose victims were discovered near hypodermic needles or pill bottles, they went straight to their graves, unexamined.
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Barry Meier (Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic)
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Answering this question has been the life’s work of Samuel and Pearl Oliner, a sociologist and an education researcher. They conducted a pioneering study of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, comparing these heroic individuals with a group of neighbors who lived in the same towns but did not extend help to Jews. The rescuers had much in common with the bystanders: similar educational backgrounds, occupations, homes, neighborhoods, and political and religious beliefs. They were also equally rebellious in their childhoods—the rescuers were just as likely as the bystanders to be disciplined by their parents for disobeying, stealing, lying, cheating, aggressing, and failing to do what they were told. What differentiated the rescuers was how their parents disciplined bad behavior and praised good behavior.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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To develop “naturally,” this kind of love requires secrecy and obstruction. The presence of an obstacle to the consummation of romantic love is so essential that in the archetypal courtly romance of Tristan and Iseult, when Tristan and Iseult (who is married to Tristan’s lord, King Mark) finally flee to the wilderness for three years after a risky affair under the King’s nose at court, they live together chastely. When the barrier is removed and romance is finally attainable, it atrophies. Later, romance returns when the lovers are again separated.
This strange paradox, in which lovers risk life and limb in order to consummate an affair only to witness the affair fizzle when all obstructions are removed, is not unusual in court love poetry. Unfortunately, the same paradox has become common in modern marriage: passion thrives when love is young, and it especially swells in the face of societal obstruction, rival courters, or external hardships. When parents are disapproving, or there is a social taboo, passionate amor binds the lovers together in direct proportion to the difficulty of conducting the affair. However, when the lovers are together day-after-day and night-after-night, the passion wanes and boredom replaces the professed “love.
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David Ford (Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage)
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Given the NIH's lack of record keeping, it was impossible to say exactly how underrepresented women were, but the public learned that women had been left out of many of the largest, most important clinic studies conducted in the last couple of decades. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which began in 1958 and purported to explore 'normal human aging,' didn't enroll any women for the first twenty years it ran. The Physicians' Health Study, which had recently concluded that taking a daily aspirin may reduce the risk of heart disease? Conducted in 22,071 men and zero women. The 1982 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial - known, aptly enough, as MRFIT - which looked at whether dietary change and exercise could help prevent heart disease: just 13,000 men.
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Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
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a study released early in 2018 showed that parents who encouraged their children to push their limits could be protecting them from developing childhood anxiety disorders.9 Such parenting behaviour included ‘safe risk-taking’, like giving a child a fright, engaging in rough-and-tumble play and letting them lose games. The research, which involved 312 families of preschoolers across Australia and the Netherlands, was conducted by Macquarie University’s Centre for Emotional Health, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Reading. Dr Mascaro says rough-and-tumble play is essential for children. ‘It’s really good for developing emotional and social competence. I think it’s potentially really important that dads of daughters aren’t doing that as much. It’s hard to know why that is. It could be that daughters just don’t like it,’ she says, ‘but it could also be because of gendered ideas about how we think we should behave with sons and daughters. I know I have two little boys and we have a whole room devoted to rough-and-tumble play. It is a huge part of our lives and it makes me sad to imagine that that’s not necessarily part of everyone’s life, because it’s such an important part of play.
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Madonna King (Fathers and Daughters: Helping girls and their dads build unbreakable bonds)
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When we conduct a penetration test on a system, we are not changing the state of the application with this inspection; rather, we are changing our uncertainty about the state of the application.
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Douglas W. Hubbard (How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk)
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Four kinds of antioxidants were
measured: carotenoids, vitamin C, selenium and vitamin E. Except for
selenium, each of these nutrient groups was associated with fewer cases
of macular degeneration, although only the carotenoids showed statistically
significant results. Risk of macular degeneration was reduced by
two-thirds for those people with the highest levels of carotenoids in
their blood, when compared with the low-carotenoid group.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health)
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The dementia that is caused by the same vascular problems that lead to stroke
is clearly affected by diet. In a publication from the famous Framingham Study, researchers conclude that for every three additional servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the risk of stroke will be reduced by 22%.73
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health)
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In October of 1991, on the day I met Steve, it was only by chance that I stopped at his wildlife park at all. I had been sleeping in the backseat of a car on the way back from a barbecue at a friend of a friend’s house. Up front, Lori’s friend knew I was interested in zoos. When he saw a sign for this one, he debated with himself whether he should wake me. Even when he did, I wasn’t sure if this reptile park was going to be much more than a few snakes in little glass tanks.
So it was only by chance that I was on that highway at all, and only chance that I stopped. And it was only by chance that Steve conducted the croc show that day. Some days, Wes did the show.
Chance. Fate. Destiny.
These were words I lived by. I believed my life had been shaped for a special purpose. But with Steve’s death my faith was tested. Was it pure chance that Steve, a man who cheated mortality almost every single day of his adult life, died in such a bizarre accident?
During the decade and a half that I knew him, I don’t think a week went by when he didn’t get a bite, blow, or injury of some kind. His knee and shoulder plagued him from years of jumping crocs. As Steve erected a fence at our Brigalow Belt conservation property, a big fence-post driver he was using slipped and landed directly on his head, compressing the fifth disk in his neck. Even injured, he still managed to push on--at the zoo, filming, and doing heavy construction. He went at work like a bull at a gate. He climbed trees with orangutans. He traversed the most remote deserts and the most impossible mountains. He packed his life chock-a-block full with risks of all kinds.
“I get called an adrenaline junkie every other minute,” Steve said. “I’m just fine with that.”
One crowded hour of glorious life is worth more than an age without a name. I had no regrets for Steve’s glorious life, and I know he couldn’t have lived any other way.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following: • Analyze the mission. —Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal). —Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission. • Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available. • Decentralize the planning process. —Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action. • Determine a specific course of action. —Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action. —Focus efforts on the best course of action. • Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action. • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation. • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible. • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders. —Stand back and be the tactical genius. • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation. • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets. —Emphasize Commander’s Intent. —Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand. • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. —Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.
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Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
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Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 1787
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Tim Weiner (Enemies: A History of the FBI)
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Know Singapore’s Credit Bureau to Get License Money Lender Approval
Do you ever wonder how a licensed money lender like banks get the information they need to decide whether they will approve your loan or not? In this article, you’ll know the Credit Bureau Singapore (CBS) role on the moneylenders’ process of lending money.
History of CBS
Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) and DBIC Holdings owns CBS. It was founded on November 15, 2002, and its key role is to serve as a financial risk management tool for financial institutions. Among CBS founders’ are Citibank, United Overseas Bank (UOB), Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), American Express, ANZ, Maybank, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank.
Key Role of CBS on Licensed Money Lender Loan Approval
The CBS is a private company established to help financial companies and credit card institutions to evaluate the threats and opportunities of giving credit to possible or current customers. To put simply, when you apply for a loan, the CBS gives the licensed moneylender your credit report. This credit report reflects your credit information such as credit history, repayment track, and in some cases default records, lawsuit, and bankruptcy reports. This valuable information is collected from financial institutions and other public data resources (like subpoena and data of bankruptcy) which is part of CBS.
The Banking Act allows the CB to get such customer’s confidential data and produce a “complete risk profile.” CBS follows a stringent code of conduct to protect the consumer’s data privacy. Only the official members of CBS can access and use the credit information. Licensed money lender should not disclose any information about their clients’ credit background to any third party. The CB also cannot collect customer’s personal data such as contact numbers, home address, credit limit, and salary.
Now that you finally know who helps licensed money lender to decide your loan’s approval, you should now know that borrowing money is not as simple as it sounds. Multiple agencies are working together to check whether you are worthy of the money.
”
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Michael Arnold
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Know Singapore’s Credit Bureau to Get License Money Lender Approval
Do you ever wonder how a licensed money lender like banks get the information they need to decide whether they will approve your loan or not? In this article, you’ll know the Credit Bureau Singapore (CBS) role on the moneylenders’ process of lending money.
History of CBS
Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) and DBIC Holdings owns CBS. It was founded on November 15, 2002, and its key role is to serve as a financial risk management tool for financial institutions. Among CBS founders’ are Citibank, United Overseas Bank (UOB), Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), American Express, ANZ, Maybank, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank.
Key Role of CBS on Licensed Money Lender Loan Approval
The CBS is a private company established to help financial companies and credit card institutions to evaluate the threats and opportunities of giving credit to possible or current customers. To put simply, when you apply for a loan, the CBS gives the licensed moneylender your credit report. This credit report reflects your credit information such as credit history, repayment track, and in some cases default records, lawsuit, and bankruptcy reports. This valuable information is collected from financial institutions and other public data resources (like subpoena and data of bankruptcy) which is part of CBS.
The Banking Act allows the CB to get such customer’s confidential data and produce a “complete risk profile.” CBS follows a stringent code of conduct to protect the consumer’s data privacy. Only the official members of CBS can access and use the credit information. Licensed money lender should not disclose any information about their clients’ credit background to any third party. The CB also cannot collect customer’s personal data such as contact numbers, home address, credit limit, and salary.
Now that you finally know who helps licensed money lender to decide your loan’s approval, you should now know that borrowing money is not as simple as it sounds. Multiple agencies are working together to check whether you are worthy of the money.
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”
Credit and Debt
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I see that conducting the BPO is an enormous privilege and that with it come certain risks: for instance, that I will not always have a full orchestra at important rehearsals. I know now that while I will do what I can to see that every chair is filled, I will accept the fact that this will not always be the case. I have come finally to the realization that relationships with my colleagues, players, students, and friends are always more important than the project in which we are engaged; and that indeed, the very success of the project depends on those relationships being full of grace. I have also realized that someone who stands up to me and is unwilling to accept abusive behavior is more of an ally than someone who goes along with it, either out of fear or resignation.
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Rosamund Stone Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources.
The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today.
Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.
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David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
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Here are a few notable things that can spark inflammation and depress the function of your liver: Alcohol overload—This is relatively well-known. Your liver is largely responsible for metabolizing alcohol, and drinking too much liquid courage can send your liver running to cry in a corner somewhere. Carbohydrate bombardment—Starches and sugar have the fastest ability to drive up blood glucose, liver glycogen, and liver fat storage (compared to their protein and fat macronutrient counterparts). Bringing in too many carbs, too often, can elicit a wildfire of fat accumulation. In fact, one of the most effective treatments for reversing NAFLD is reducing the intake of carbohydrates. A recent study conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Cell Metabolism had overweight test subjects with high levels of liver fat reduce their ratio of carbohydrate intake (without reducing calories!). After a short two-week study period the subjects showed “rapid and dramatic” reductions of liver fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors. Too many medications—Your liver is the top doc in charge of your body’s drug metabolism. When you hear about drug side effects on commercials, they are really a direct effect of how your liver is able to handle them. The goal is to work on your lifestyle factors so that you can be on as few medications as possible along with the help of your physician. Your liver will do its best to support you either way, but it will definitely feel happier without the additional burden. Too many supplements—There are several wonderful supplements that can be helpful for your health, but becoming an overzealous natural pill-popper might not be good for you either. In a program funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that liver injuries linked to supplement use jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of all medication/supplement-induced injuries in just a ten-year time span. Again, this is not to say that the right supplements can’t be great for you. This merely points to the fact that your liver is also responsible for metabolism of all of the supplements you take as well. And popping a couple dozen different supplements each day can be a lot for your liver to handle. Plus, the supplement industry is largely unregulated, and the additives, fillers, and other questionable ingredients could add to the burden. Do your homework on where you get your supplements from, avoid taking too many, and focus on food first to meet your nutritional needs. Toxicants—According to researchers at the University of Louisville, more than 300 environmental chemicals, mostly pesticides, have been linked to fatty liver disease. Your liver is largely responsible for handling the weight of the toxicants (most of them newly invented) that we’re exposed to in our world today. Pesticides are inherently meant to be deadly, but just to small organisms (like pests), though it seems to be missed that you are actually made of small organisms, too (bacteria
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Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
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Page 311:
Moreover, within the economic sphere there are no common standards of conduct beyond those prescribed by law. The European has his own standard of decency as to what, even in business, ‘is not done’; so also have the Chinese, the Indian and the native [of Burma]. All have their own ideas as to what is right and proper, but on this matter they have different ideas, and the only idea common to all members of all sections is the idea of gain. In a homogeneous society the desire of profit is controlled to some extent by social will, and if anyone makes profits by sharp practice, he will offend the social conscience and incur moral, and perhaps legal, penalties. If, for example, he employs sweated labour, the social conscience, if sufficiently alert and powerful, may penalize him because aware, either instinctively or by rational conviction, that such conduct cuts at the root of common social life. But in the tropics the European who, from humanitarian motives or through enlightened self-interest, treats his employees well, risks being forced out of business by Indians or Chinese with different standards. The only deterrent to unsocial conduct in production is the legal penalty to which those are liable who can be brought to trial and convicted according to the rules of evidence of infringing some positive law. In supply as in demand, in production as in consumption, the abnormal activity of economic forces, free of social restrictions, is an essential character of a plural society.
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J.S. Furnivall (Colonial Policy And Practice)
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Afterward, someone associated with the orchestra asked me in a hushed voice, “Would you like to know who came in early in the Mendelssohn?” Whether it was the slightly conspiratorial nature of the question that put me off, or whether it was that such a question was in disturbing contrast with the spiritedness of the music that we had just performed, I found myself saying, “No” abruptly, and then adding, “I did it.” Not literally, of course. I didn’t actually play the violin. But in that moment, in the context of the great music we had just made, it seemed absurd to me to consider handing out blame. It could only divide us, and for what? Certainly that player would never again come in early in the Italian Symphony, nor, perhaps, from this time on, make the mistake of a premature entrance in any performance. And I myself would know to be especially careful in guiding the orchestra through those eleven steps whenever I conducted that passage again. There was absolutely no gain to blaming anyone, and a real cost in terms of the blow to our integrity as a group. Besides, I know full well that every time I step onto a podium, I take a risk that things won’t turn out exactly as I anticipate them in my ear—but then, there is no great music-making without such risk taking.
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Rosamund Stone Zander (The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life)
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What was the new research he was referencing? A research document that claimed to show benefit to masking based on reviewing a collection of studies, which somehow ignored all of the randomized controlled trials showing no effect from masking. These kinds of glaring omissions have been a continuous problem among scientists desperate to justify the implementation of masks despite the gold standard of evidence indicating they would be effectively useless. One randomized controlled trial did occur during 2020, conducted by researchers in Denmark. Those researchers’ objective was clearly stated: “To assess whether recommending surgical mask use outside the home reduces wearers’ risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in a setting where masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures.”25 Given all of the pre-COVID scientific research, it should come as no surprise that the results showed no benefit to mask wearing to protect against infection with COVID-19. The Denmark researchers’ summary clearly identifies the lack of any significant impact: “The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers.” Thousands of Danes were enrolled in this trial, the most comprehensive effort by any scientific researchers to study the potential effect of mask wearing by the general public. Participants were provided high-quality surgical masks, not the cloth face coverings recommended by many public health agencies. In the best approximation of a gold-standard clinical trial that researchers could design, the results showed absolutely no statistically significant benefit. The findings, surprisingly, received no major media attention, nor did they generate questions for the expert community that now universally embrace masking.
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Ian Miller (Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates)
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In Canada, an estimated one in three people lives with at least one chronic disease. Conditions that appeared to increase the risk and severity of COVID-19 included type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other heart conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic kidney disease and cancer.
All of these conditions have been shown to be associated with inadequate diets and malnutrition, either as a cause or consequence of the disease. We normally associate the word "malnutrition" with undernutrition or starvation. However, malnutrition also applies to overconsumption of calories, protein or fat and frequently results in overweight or obesity.
A well-primed immune response depends on good nutrition to function, and malnutrition is known to increase susceptibility to infections. In turn, infection can aggravate malnutrition, since it increases the body's demand for nutrients. This creates a vicious cycle, further increasing vulnerability to infection.
In Canada, malnutrition is much more widespread than we would like to believe. A cross-Canada study conducted in eighteen hospitals screened patients for malnutrition on admission and found 45 per cent of them to be malnourished. Those who were malnourished had significantly longer hospital stays than those who were not.
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Aileen Burford-Mason (The War Against Viruses: How the Science of Optimal Nutrition Can Help You Win)
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Most recently, in 2020, a large study conducted by a team of researchers from multiple national health organizations found that, compared with taking 4,000 steps per day, reaching 8,000 daily steps was associated with a 51 percent lower risk of death from all causes. Taking 12,000 steps per day was associated with a 65 percent lower risk.
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Kelly Starrett (Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully)
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Always remember that you are dealing with chaos and conduct your affairs accordingly. As the Axiom says, chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.
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Max Gunther (The Zurich Axioms: The rules of risk and reward used by generations of Swiss bankers)
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Approach everything you pursue hypothetically and bravely test your assumptions. Get messy and enjoy the discoveries. And above all else, embrace experimenting over perfectionism and over-planning. Conducting little experiments with your endeavors reframes your work as part scientific method, part creative process, and—if relevant to you—part entrepreneurial risk-taking.
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Jeffrey Davis (Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed with Productivity)
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Finally, a study of more than one hundred thousand nurses (two-thirds of them women) that controlled for smoking, weight, alcohol consumption, sex, and age found an inverse dose-response relationship between levels of physical activity and the risk of pneumonia, with a more than 30 percent reduction between the women (but not men) who were most and least active.55 Despite these encouraging findings, not all studies report lower RTI rates among exercisers, in part because these sorts of trials are difficult to conduct.
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Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
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When Richard Cooper went to medical school at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, he was stunned at how many of his black patients were suffering from high blood pressure. He would encounter people in their forties and fifties felled by strokes that left them institutionalized. When Cooper did some research on the problem, he learned that American doctors had first noted the high rate of hypertension in American blacks decades earlier. Cardiologists concluded it must be the result of genetic differences between blacks and whites. Paul Dudley White, the preeminent American cardiologist of the early 1900s, called it a “racial predisposition,” speculating that the relatives of American blacks in West Africa must suffer from high blood pressure as well. Cooper went on to become a cardiologist himself, conducting a series of epidemiological studies on heart disease. In the 1990s, he finally got the opportunity to put the racial predisposition hypothesis to the test. Collaborating with an international network of doctors, Cooper measured the blood pressure of eleven thousand people. Paul Dudley White, it turned out, was wrong. Farmers in rural Nigeria and Cameroon actually had substantially lower blood pressure than American blacks, Cooper found. In fact, they had lower blood pressure than white Americans, too. Most surprisingly of all, Cooper found that people in Finland, Germany, and Spain had higher blood pressure than American blacks. Cooper’s findings don’t challenge the fact that genetic variants can increase people’s risk of developing high blood pressure. In fact, Cooper himself has helped run studies that have revealed some variants in African Americans and Nigerians that can raise that risk. But this genetic inheritance does not, on its own, explain the experiences of African and European Americans. To understand their differences, doctors need to examine the experiences of blacks and whites in the United States—the stress of life in high-crime neighborhoods and the difficulty of getting good health care, for example. These are powerful inheritances, too, but they’re not inscribed in DNA. For scientists carrying out the hard work of disentangling these influences, an outmoded biological concept of race offers no help. In the words of the geneticists Noah Rosenberg and Michael Edge, it has become “a sideshow and a distraction.
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Carl Zimmer (She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become)
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Exercise research over the past two decades has established the value of regular exercise. Initial claims that strenuous exercise was required to gain the benefits is no longer believed. In a representative study by Nathan Feder of the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, 82,872 volunteers were equally divided between men and women with the median age of 63.9 years. In this English Longitudinal Study of Aging conducted from 2002 to 2019, the results demonstrated that physical activity was associated with a lower risk for dementia.
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Richard Restak (The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind)
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Overall, it was a pretty good trading strategy. He made money in two out of three possible scenarios. If bond prices went down, he made a lot of money. If the market stayed the same, he earned free interest on the cash. If the Treasury market rallied, he risked a pretty big loss. And guess what? Between February 1982 and May 1982, the Treasury market reversed its decline and started to rally. This was the one chance in three that he wasn’t hoping for. When the May 15, 1982, coupon interest payments were due on a Monday, Drysdale was wiped out and didn’t have enough money to make the payments. That Sunday evening, Heuwetter called Drysdale's clearing bank, Chase Manhattan, and informed them that "we may have a problem" meeting the $160 million interest payment due the next day. Could Chase possibly lend Drysdale $200 million to tide them over? What he didn’t tell them was that, yes, the market rally had wiped them out, but the problem was even worse than that. Drysdale had conducted its Repo trading mostly through Chase's Securities Lending Department.
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Scott E.D. Skyrm (The Repo Market, Shorts, Shortages, and Squeezes)
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Members of The Center for AI Safety say that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, because inventing machines that are more powerful than us is playing with fire. While AI has many beneficial applications, it can be used to perpetuate bias, power autonomous weapons, promote misinformation, and conduct cyberattacks. Even as AI systems are used with human involvement, AI agents are increasingly able to act autonomously to cause harm.
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Perry Stone (Artificial Intelligence Versus God: The Final Battle for Humanity)
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The judges who breach, violate, and break the concept of the constitution and law are not fair to society, even to themselves; they just put the mask on their faces as the judge. However, history is their judge that does not ignore the reality.
A verdict is neither a vote nor a consensus nor a customary decision; it is the interpretation and conclusion of the constitution and law, and judges set it accordingly in the context of that and ensure its implementation.
The constitution is like a rose; foreign policy is its fragrance that flies freely everywhere, and everyone feels equally beyond restrictions. Sure, such context carries beauty, dignity, self-determination, freedom, and success; otherwise, the sting of thorns becomes a painful risk.
In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings.
Tit for Tat is neither a constitution nor a law; it is just an act of revenge. If it continues, be sure everything collapses wherever it happens.
The cheap army, undemocratic state, and corrupt nation neither fulfill their oath nor comply with their constitution.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Many have been supposedly foolproof but zany formulae that have made no one rich but the hucksters who sold them to the gullible. But over the years there have been some approaches that have enjoyed at least a modicum of success. These range from the Dow Theory first espoused by Wall Street Journal founder Charles Dow—essentially using technical indicators to try to identify and profit from different market phases—and David Butler’s CANSLIM system, to the value investing school articulated by Benjamin Graham. The earth-shattering suggestion of the research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s was that the code might actually be unbreakable, and efforts to decipher it were expensive and futile. Harry Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory and William Sharpe’s CAPM indicated that the market itself was the optimal balance between risks and return, while Gene Fama presented a cohesive, compelling argument for why that was: The net effect of the efforts of thousands upon thousands of investors continually trying to outsmart each other was that the stock market was efficient, and in practice hard to beat. Most investors should therefore just sit on their hands and buy the entire market. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a new round of groundbreaking research—some of it from the same efficient-markets disciples who had rattled the investing world in the 1960s and 1970s—started revealing some fault lines in the academic edifice built up in the previous decades. Perhaps the stock market wasn’t entirely efficient, and maybe there were indeed ways to beat it in the long run? Some gremlins in the system were always known, but often glossed over. Already in the early 1970s, Black and Scholes had noted that there were some odd issues with the theory, such as how less volatile stocks actually produced better long-term returns than choppier ones. That contradicted the belief that return and risk (using volatility as a proxy for risk) were correlated. In other words, loopier roller coasters produce greater thrills. Though the theory made intuitive sense, in practice it didn’t seem to hold up to rigorous scrutiny. This is why Scholes and Black initially proposed that Wells Fargo should set up a fund that would buy lower-volatility stocks (that is, low-beta) and use leverage to bring the portfolio’s overall volatility up to the broader stock market.7 Hey, presto, a roller coaster with the same number of loops as everyone else, but with even greater thrills. Nonetheless, the efficient-markets hypothesis quickly became dogma at business schools around the United States.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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The success of product development and launch strategies for businesses in all industries is greatly influenced by best market research companies in Myanmar. These businesses enable businesses to make informed decisions that drive innovation and market penetration by providing valuable insights into consumer behaviors, market trends, and competitive landscapes. In today's dynamic business environment, it is essential for organizations looking to create competitive products and launch them successfully to comprehend the significance of market research. This article looks at how market research companies play a variety of roles in product development and launch strategies. It emphasizes the importance of working together, making decisions based on data, and taking advantage of market research trends for long-term growth and market leadership.
1. Companies' Introduction to Market Research An Overview of Business Market Research Market research is essential for helping businesses comprehend their market, competition, and customers. To make decisions based on accurate information, it involves gathering and evaluating data.
Contribution of best market research companies in Myanmar to Product Development Market research firms are specialized in collecting insights that can be used to inform product development strategies for businesses. They assist in determining the demand for new products, assessing consumer behavior, and identifying market opportunities.
2. Understanding Consumer Needs and Preferences is Critical to Product Development Market research provides businesses with in-depth insights into consumer preferences, needs, and actions. In order to create products that resonate with the intended audience, this understanding is essential.
Research can be used to assess market demand and potential, allowing businesses to make decisions about product development based on data. New products' chances of success are boosted while risks are reduced.
3. Utilizing Market Research for Launch Strategies Market Segmentation and Targeting Market research enables businesses to divide their target market into subsets based on behavior, psychographics, and demographics. For a more successful product launch, this segmentation helps tailor marketing strategies to specific consumer groups.
Pricing and Positioning Strategies Businesses can figure out the best pricing strategy for their products based on consumer perceptions, competitor pricing, and market trends by conducting market research. Additionally, research aids in effectively positioning products in the market to set them apart from rivals.
4. Collaborating with Market Research Firms Choosing the Right Market Research Partner It is essential to select the right market research partner in order to obtain insights that are both accurate and applicable. Expertise, industry experience, and the capacity to provide insights that are in line with the company's goals should all be taken into account.
Creating Effective Research Briefs Businesses should provide their market research partner with concise and in-depth research briefs to maximize the value of the research. A clearly defined brief assists in ensuring that the research is focused, pertinent, and in line with the company's objectives. 5. Studies of Cases: Product Launches That Work: The Importance of Market Research Market research is essential to the success of product launches. We are able to see the direct impact of market research on product development strategies by analyzing real-world examples. Market research companies offer valuable insights that can make or break a product launch, from comprehending consumer preferences to determining market gaps.
### Impact of Market Research on Product Launches Market research has a significant impact on product launches because it ensures that businesses know what their target audience wants and needs. Companies are able to effectively f
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best market research
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One way to do this is to help the client understand all the available options by conducting a thorough exploration of advantages, disadvantages, risks, and costs.
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David H. Maister (The Trusted Advisor: 20th Anniversary Edition)
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Among other things, effective advice giving requires an ability to suppress one’s own ego and emotional needs. The most effective way to influence a client is to help the person feel that the solution was (to a large extent) his or her idea, or at the very least, his or her decision. One way to do this is to help the client understand all the available options by conducting a thorough exploration of advantages, disadvantages, risks, and costs.
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David H. Maister (The Trusted Advisor: 20th Anniversary Edition)
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market research consultant in india: AMT Market Research Having accurate and insightful market research is essential for making informed decisions in today's dynamic business environment. AMT Market Research, a prominent Indian market research consultant, specializes in providing custom solutions to assist businesses in navigating the Indian market's complexities. AMT Market Research aids businesses in a variety of industries in locating growth opportunities, mitigating risks, and remaining competitive by having a thorough comprehension of local consumer behavior, economic trends, and industry shifts.
Services and Expertise AMT Market Research offers a wide range of services tailored to each client's specific requirements. These are some:
Market Analysis By conducting a thorough market analysis, AMT assists businesses in comprehending market share, size, and trends. AMT ensures that businesses have the data they need to make strategic decisions by evaluating key industry drivers, competitive landscapes, and potential growth areas.
Customer Insights Any business that wants to succeed in India's vast and varied market must have a solid understanding of consumer behavior. Businesses can use AMT's consumer insights services to create targeted products and marketing strategies by delving deeply into buying patterns, preferences, and motivations.
By analyzing competitors' strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning, competitor analysis from AMT aids businesses in benchmarking. By taking advantage of their distinct value propositions and comprehending the dynamics of the competition, this service enables businesses to maintain their lead.
AMT's feasibility studies provide a comprehensive analysis of potential outcomes prior to launching a new product, entering a new market, or expanding operations, assisting clients in assessing risks and profitability.
Data Collection and Analysis AMT uses surveys, interviews, and focus groups to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Advanced analytics are used by the company to transform unstructured data into useful insights, giving businesses a clear path forward.
What Attracts You to AMT Market Research?
AMT Market Research stands out because it is able to provide individualized solutions that address the particular difficulties that the Indian market faces. AMT provides insights that are accurate, timely, and applicable thanks to a team of seasoned professionals. Clients will be able to anticipate and prepare for changes thanks to their data-driven approach.
AMT is a dependable partner for businesses looking to expand in India or strengthen their market position because of its extensive network across various industries and unparalleled access to market information. market research consultant in india can help you stay ahead of the competition, whether you're a local business or a multinational corporation.
In conclusion, businesses aiming for success in India need AMT Market Research as a crucial partner. AMT helps its customers make well-informed decisions that drive growth and profitability by providing individualized research solutions, consumer insights, and strategic analysis. AMT Market Research is the preferred consulting firm for businesses attempting to navigate the Indian market's complexities.
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market research consultant in india
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Uncovering the World of Legit Bank Transfer: Financial Source You Can Trust.
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The Rise of Safepairs Bank Transfer Hack
The evolution of technology has given rise to a new breed of individuals — Safepairs transfer hackers. These experts possess the skills to facilitate secure and efficient bank transfers, offering a lifeline to those in need.
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Employment drug testing is a critical practice that helps businesses maintain a safe and productive environment. It ensures that employees are not using substances that could impair their judgment, performance, or safety at work. In industries where precision and safety are key, such as construction, healthcare, and transportation, regular drug testing reduces the risk of accidents and enhances overall workplace efficiency.
Employers can implement employment drug testing during the hiring process or conduct random tests for current employees. This not only helps in detecting potential substance abuse but also serves as a preventive measure, deterring employees from using drugs. Additionally, it helps companies comply with legal regulations, avoiding costly lawsuits or fines related to workplace safety violations.
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In today’s interconnected world, bank transfers have become an integral part of our financial lives. Whether you’re conducting business internationally or sending money to a family member abroad.
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Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward. Many of Trump’s former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president Mike Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats; former chief of staff John Kelly; former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
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Bob Woodward (War)
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Uncovering the World of Legit Bank Transfer: Financial Source You Can Trust
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Introduction
In a digital age where financial transactions have become an integral part of our lives, the need for security and reliability is paramount. Uncovering the world of bank hack transfer, Its a journey that leads to a financial source you can trust. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the intricacies of this fascinating realm, revealing valuable insights about bank hack transfer worldwide.
The Rise of Safepairs Bank Transfer Hack
The evolution of technology has given rise to a new breed of individuals — Safepairs transfer hackers. These experts possess the skills to facilitate secure and efficient bank transfers, offering a lifeline to those in need.
What Sets Safepairs Bank Transfer Hackers Apart?
Safepairs bank transfer hackers distinguish themselves through their ethical approach. They prioritize helping individuals who have encountered financial hardships.
Benefits of Using Safepairs Bank Transfer Hackers
Financial Assistance: Safepairs bank transfer hackers offer financial solutions for various situations, including debt repayment, emergency expenses, and investment opportunities.
Enhanced Security: Safepairs identify and patch security flaws in your online banking or financial transactions, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Swift and Secure Transactions: These experts excel in providing fast and secure bank transfers, reducing the hassle of traditional banking procedures.
Anonymity: Some individuals seek the services of legit hackers to maintain their anonymity during financial transactions.
Personalized Services: Safepairs bank transfer hackers tailor their services to meet individual needs, ensuring a customized experience.
Educational Value: Ethical hackers may provide insights into the vulnerabilities of your financial systems, helping you better understand and protect your assets.
Conclusion
Uncovering the world of Safepairs bank transfer hack reveals a financial source you can trust. These ethical experts offer invaluable assistance and security in the realm of financial transactions. By following the guidelines and conducting thorough research, you can access their services with confidence.
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Finding the Best Immigration Lawyer in Sydney:
Services offered Navigating the complex landscape of immigration law can be daunting, especially in a city as diverse and bustling as Sydney. The right immigration lawyer can be an invaluable asset by providing essential advice and support. Here is a closer look at the services offered by the best immigration lawyers in Sydney and how they can help you during your immigration journey.
Help with visa application
One of the primary services provided by immigration attorneys is assistance with visa applications. There are different visa categories in Australia, including:
Skilled Worker Visa: For individuals with specific skills that are in demand in Australia.
Family visas: For reunification of family members, including partner, child and parent visas. Student visa: For those who want to study in Australia.
Visitor visas: For short-term visits for tourism or business. The best immigration lawyers will help clients determine the most appropriate visa category, prepare the necessary documentation, and ensure correct and timely submission of applications.
Legal advice and representation
Immigration law can be complex, with ever-changing rules and regulations. An experienced immigration attorney provides legal advice customized to your situation. They can clarify complex legal jargon, outline your rights and responsibilities, and discuss the potential risks and benefits of different immigration options.
If your application is refused or if you face visa cancellation, an experienced lawyer will represent you in appeals or judicial reviews. Their experience in handling such cases can greatly increase your chances of a favorable outcome.
Preparation for interviews
Many visa applications require interviews with immigration authorities. The best immigration attorneys will prepare you for these interviews by conducting mock interviews and advising you on how to effectively present your case. They will help you understand the types of questions that may come up and how to confidently answer them, ensuring that you are well prepared for the day.
Compliance and Legal Obligations
Once you have obtained a visa, it is essential to meet its conditions. Immigration attorneys provide advice on your responsibilities as a visa holder and help you understand what it takes to avoid violations that could jeopardize your immigration status. This includes understanding employment rights, study requirements and reporting obligations.
Applications for permanent residence and citizenship
For many immigrants, the ultimate goal is to achieve permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Immigration attorneys can help you with permanent residency applications, guide you through the points test and ensure that you meet all the necessary requirements.
In addition, if you want to apply for Australian citizenship, an immigration lawyer can help you understand the eligibility criteria, prepare your application and deal with any issues. They can also help you prepare for your citizenship test and ensure you are ready to demonstrate your knowledge of Australian history, culture and values.
Help with special cases
Some immigration situations are more complicated than others.
The best immigration lawyers are equipped to handle special cases, including:
Refugee and Humanitarian Visas: For those seeking asylum in Australia due to persecution or significant risk in their home country.
Employer-sponsored visas: We help businesses sponsor foreign workers and ensure compliance with labor laws.
Health and Character Issues: Addressing issues that may arise from health screenings or character evaluations, helps clients prepare necessary documentation and appeals.
Consulting services for businesses
If you are a business looking to hire talent from overseas, an immigration attorney can provide essential services. They can h
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immigration lawyer sydney
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Control rose. He needed a moment to tamp down his temper. This was perilously close to insubordination, and rather than lash out, he went across to the mantelpiece and adjusted the photograph of his family. He spoke carefully: “What’s the Group for, Milton?” “Framing. Extortion. Elimination.” “Jobs that are too dirty for Her Majesty’s security services to touch.” “Quite so, sir.” “And your job?” “Cleaner.” “Which means?” “‘From time to time Her Majesty’s government needs to remove people whose continued existence poses a risk to the effective conduct of public order. The government requires particularly skilled professionals who are prepared to work on a non-attributable basis to deal with these problems.’ Cleaners.” He smiled without humour. That was the job description he had used when he recruited him all those years ago. All those neutral euphemisms, all designed to make the job easier to palate. “It takes a special kind of man to do that kind of work. There are so few of you—and, unfortunately, that makes you rather difficult to replace.” He paused. “Do you know how many people you’ve eliminated for me?
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Mark Dawson (The Cleaner (John Milton, #1))
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I had seriously considered conducting an unscheduled press conference after the November meeting, but decided that it risked disrupting markets. Instead, I spent several hours telephoning key reporters individually, answering questions on background. I also wrote an op-ed that was published November 4 in the Washington Post. Despite these efforts, I was unprepared for the blowback from policymakers abroad and politicians at home.
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Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
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If 100 percent success, 0 casualties are your goal, you’re going to conduct very few operations. You will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise.
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Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
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Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.
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Ann Jones (They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story (Dispatch Books))
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Unfortunately, however, pragmatist customers rarely adopt any new technology en masse. Usually these innovations are taken up first by a single niche, one that has such pressing problems it goes ahead of the herd. The rest of the herd is delighted by this eventuality because it gets a free look at how well the technology plays out without having to take any immediate risk. The niche wins—presuming the beachhead strategy is conducted correctly—by getting a state-of-the-art fix for its heretofore unsolvable problem. And the vendor wins because it gets certified by at least one segment of pragmatists that its offering is legitimately mainstream.
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Geoffrey A. Moore (Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers)
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Back in 1933, during the height of the populist backlash against Wall Street, the son of J. Pierpont Morgan—J. P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr.—had been grilled by Congress about his ethos. He declared that the aim of his bank was to conduct “first-class business…in a first-class way.” Fifty years later, that mantra of Jack Morgan struck much of the banking world as quaint. Years of bold innovation had made high-risk trading and aggressive deal making the gold standard of the street, and a “kill or be killed” ethic prevailed. At
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Gillian Tett (Fool's Gold)
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many cases, however, there were failures in investments
because the risk management on investments was
conducted as a mere formality or inspection of outside
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조건만구함
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Guideline #11: Embellish at your own risk. In troubled economic times and during periods of high unemployment, many job seekers will embellish or outright lie on their résumés to secure employment. Employers are well aware of this. Many companies will terminate the interview or your employment if they discover you lied on your résumé. Yes, you have to be resourceful and aggressive to get your foot in the door. But keep in mind that today employers are conducting extensive background and reference checks more than ever before. If you lie on your résumé to get your foot in the door, chances are when they find out, you’ll get the boot.
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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Our top command wanted us to achieve 100 percent success, and to do it with 0 casualties. That may sound admirable—who doesn’t want to succeed, and who wants anyone to get hurt? But in war those are incompatible and unrealistic. If 100 percent success, 0 casualties are your goal, you’re going to conduct very few operations. You will never take any risks, realistic or otherwise.
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Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
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FDA classifies devices according to the risk they pose to consumers. Premarket review is required for moderate- and high-risk devices. There are two paths that manufacturers can use to bring such devices to market. One path consists of conducting clinical studies, submitting a premarket approval (PMA) application and requires evidence providing reasonable assurance that the device is safe and effective. The other path involves submitting a 510(k) notification demonstrating that the device is substantially equivalent to a device already on the market (a predicate device) that does not require a PMA. The 510(k) process results in FDA clearance and tends to be much less expensive and less time-consuming than seeking FDA approval via PMA.
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Judith A. Johnson (FDA Regulation of Medical Devices)