Constraints Best Quotes

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Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Basic Writings of Nietzsche)
Love has no time constraints.There is no time frame for when a person can fall in love with another,it just happens.It's spontaneous, unpredictable, it's timeless.
Becky Andrews (The Forgotten Night)
Sometimes the best argument is the one that we refuse to have.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The best AI techniques are not the ones most talked about or the most sophisticated; the best AI techniques solve a problem with adherence to business needs and constraints.
Kavita Ganesan (The Business Case for AI: A Leader's Guide to AI Strategies, Best Practices & Real-World Applications)
Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.
Daniel C. Dennett (Freedom Evolves)
The right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn’t write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
Temperament is closely related to mood but best refers to the sum total of biological constraints on personality.
Theodore Millon (Personality Disorders in Modern Life)
Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment, I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Society and Solitude)
You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can’t do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of selfrevelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind—for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive —even that degree of selfrevelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence— when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up—is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. This is why there is never enough time at one’s disposal, for the roads are long and it is easy to go astray, there are even times when one becomes afraid and has the desire—even without any constraint or enticement—to run back (a desire always severely punished later on), how much more so if one were suddenly to receive a kiss from the most beloved lips! I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure—which perhaps even in these circumstances could not be avoided—would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness.
Franz Kafka (Letters to Felice)
I don’t think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can’t make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.
Mark Vonnegut
Had I been given The [Pentagon] Papers themselves that early, I would probably have become a prisoner of them—as it was, I had a good sense of the bureaucratic history [in them] as related by an expert, but I was also free to do several hundred interviews, not merely to flesh out the bureaucratic history, but to balance the pure paper history with a human history, and to relate secret decisions as they were not always set down on paper.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it. Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.
Harry W. Kroto
To the point: A woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy has to make her decision in the context of a culture that shames her, and increasingly, within the constraints of laws that dramatically inconvenience her. They demean her humanity by presuming to know better than she does what her best interests are. They limit her access to clinics and doctors and they convey to her false information. The underlying assumption of all the new laws is that women can’t be trusted to make their own health decisions; their doctors can’t be trusted to tell them the truth; and scientific knowledge must be subverted in the name of religious truth.
Willie Parker (Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice)
NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Our advertising and even our arts convey the idea that we [Americans] as a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraint, when the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel.
Garret Keizer
Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power— that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world—over your fellow-men and fellow-women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul—that suffers so deeply from all constraint—and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right, from where do you pretend to have received it, to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings, taking from them their will, their conscience, and intelligence—in a word, all the best and highest part of their nature—turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and women, mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play, and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves, but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow-men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or being yourselves subjected by them?
Auberon Herbert
Criminals were people who operated outside social constraint. They were driven by their own dark impulses: mental illness, greed, despair, anger. Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.” Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. The kinds of social conditions that Draculas feed on were everywhere. But the Draculas weren’t everywhere. They were only on particular streets.
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
You can be too free. That's chaos. To be truly free is to be like one who is adrift on a raft in the middle of the sea. One can sail anywhere in any direction. But what good is that by itself? You need a goal. You need constraints. You need to know which way to sail with whatever meagre supplies and abilities you have. The properly led life is one that draws the best path between who you could become, and who you are today. But this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.
Christopher Ruocchio (Howling Dark (Sun Eater, #2))
But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.
Kate Bowler (No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.
Arundhati Roy
In a sense, translating may be harder than writing original fiction because a translator must strive to satisfy the same aestetic demands while being subjected to much more restrictive creative constraints. [...] The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture's patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language's rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people's gestures and movements.
Ken Liu (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other’s, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic.
Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory)
I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.
Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
The truth was that history—and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it—was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left. Our options had been steadily closing down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began. That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice. But we had granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force. By the time the Kennedy-Johnson team arrived and started talking about all their options, like it or not (and they did not even want to think about it) they had in fact almost no options at all.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It’s an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement." That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: "They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences." They knew the rules. "Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires." By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by "an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint." They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to "customize"—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.” That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: “They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention…. It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.” They knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.” By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to “customize”—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Your charming charm is a super sexy mega power that is simply impossible to overcome. Sweetest gourmet, I adore your gorgeous body, when I see you, only one word sounds in my head: yum, I will give myself completely to you. I will always love only you unconsciously, unconsciously, your gently erotic image sat in the depths of my mind completely. From your amazingly contagious beauty, your mouth opens and speechless is lost. Dizzyingly, stunningly beautiful, you are like a giant tornado, from which everything attracts you. And the heart and soul yearn all the time only for you. It doesn't matter if you love me or not, the main thing is that I still love you, and in my subconscious mind, I will only love you forever. Your luxurious appearance of the highest quality, this is a workshop, the filigree work of Mother Nature, this is just a masterpiece that constitutes a unique example of true beauty, you have no equal, you are a girl of high caliber. You are absolutely beautiful to such an extent, so beautiful, so exotic, erotic, and your image sounds poetic like very beautiful music of love, that I’m just afraid and shy to come to you, I’m afraid to talk to you, as if standing next to a goddess, or with a super mega star, a world scale model that even aliens probably know. My heart beats more often, I can’t talk normally, from excitement, goosebumps all over my body, and it just shakes. All these are symptoms of true love for you, well, simply: oh), wow). To be your boyfriend and husband is the greatest honor in the world, he knelt before you with flowers in his hands. Your appearance is perfect just like Barbie. You are so beautiful that only you want to have sex forever, countless, infinite number of times. You are unattainable, you are like a star whose light of the soul, like a searchlight, illuminates me in the deep darkness of solitude. In love with you thorough. You are simply amazingly beautiful. You are the best of the best. Goddess of all goddesses, empress of all empresses, queen of all queens. More beautiful you just can not imagine a girl. Sexier than you just can not be anything. Beautiful soul just is not found. There was nothing more perfect than you and never will be, simply because I think so. Laponka, I'm your faithful fan, you are my only idol, idol, icon of beauty. It doesn't matter who you are, I will accept you any. Because in any case I am eager to be only with you. You have a sexy smile, and your sensual look is just awesome. And from your voice and look a pleasant shiver all over your body. You are special, the best that is in all worlds, universes and dimensions. You're just a sight for sore eyes. To you I feel the most powerful, love and sexual inclination. You're cooler than any Viagra and afrodosiak. From your beauty just cling to the constraints and embarrassment.
NOT A BOOK
It’s simple,” Jane insisted. “I know just how to do it. Instead of just locking up the women who are suspected of being ill, we should lock up all the women. That way, the ones who are well can never get sick.” At the foot of the table, Whitting scratched his head. “But…how would men use their services?” “What do men have to do with it?” Jane asked. “Um.” Lord James looked down. “I take your point, Bradenton. This is…perhaps not the best conversation to be having at the moment.” “After all,” Jane continued, “if men were capable of infecting women, our government in its infinite wisdom would never choose to lock up only the women. That would be pointless, since without any constraint on men, the spread of contagion would never stop. It would also be unjust to confine women for the sin of being infected by men.” She smiled triumphantly. “And since our very good Marquess of Bradenton supports the Act, that could never be the case. He would never sign on to such manifest injustice.
Courtney Milan (The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister, #2))
I make the very best halwa chebakia. With mint tea, or qamar-el-deen- you can take some home to your family." Such an offer cannot be refused. I know this from experience. Years of traveling with my mother have taught me that food is a universal passport. Whatever the constraints of language, culture or geography, food crosses over all boundaries. To offer food is to extend the hand of friendship; to accept is to be accepted into the most closed of communities. I wondered if Francis Reynaud had ever thought of this approach. Knowing him, he hasn't. Reynaud means well, but he isn't the type to buy halwa chebakia or to drink a glass of mint tea in the little café on the corner of the Boulevard P'tit Baghdad. I followed Fatima into the house, making sure to leave my shoes at the door. It was pleasantly cool inside and smelt of frangipani; the shutters closed since midday to guard against the heat of the sun. A door led into the kitchen, from which I caught the mingled scents of anise and almond and rosewater and chickpeas cooked in turmeric, and chopped mint, and toasted cardamom, and those wonderful halwa chebakia, sweet little sesame pastries deep-fried in oil, just small enough to pop into the mouth, flower-shaped and brittle and perfect with a glass of mint tea...
Joanne Harris (Peaches for Father Francis (Chocolat, #3))
Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts—or predetermined forms—it cannot fly. Excepting those masters who transcend their craft—great medieval and Renaissance artisans, for example, or nameless artisans of traditional cultures as far back as the caves who were also spontaneous unselfconscious artists. As in fiction, the nonfiction writer is telling a story, and when that story is well-made, the placement of details and events is never random. The parts are not strung out in a line but come around full circle, like a necklace, to set off the others. They resonate, rekindle one another, stirring the reader with a cumulative effect. A good essay or article can and should have all the attributes of a good short story, including structure and design, pacing and effective placement of its parts—almost all the attributes of fiction except the creative imagination, which can never be permitted to enliven fact. The writer of nonfiction is stuck with objective reality, or should be; how his facts are arranged and presented is where his craft appears, and it can be dazzling when the writer is a good one. The best nonfiction has many, many virtues, among which simple truthfulness is perhaps foremost, yet its fidelity to the known facts is its fatal constraint.
Peter Matthiessen
A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest. We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it. Not all hidden institutional functions are worth facilitating, however. Some involve quite wasteful signaling expenditures, and we might be better off if these institutions performed only their official, stated functions. Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive. These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform. Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
We should rest content with nothing, however good it may seem or be, so that, when we find ourselves under pressure or constraint, it will be apparent that we are more worked than working, and so that we may learn to enter into a relationship of cooperation with our God. It is not that we should abandon, neglect or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to acting without any compulsion. For we should concentrate on this inner prompting, and act from it, whether through reading or praying or – if it is fitting – some form of external activity. Though if the external activity destroys the internal one, we should give priority to the latter. But if both are united as one, then that is best for cooperating with God.
Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings)
In the current business scenario, it is imperative for all the business persons to take efficient Backup Thunderbird Mac so that they don’t have to lose their precious data permanently due to various security hazards. So, if you are also looking for an alternative for doing so, then Inventpure’s Mail Backup X is the best solution for you. This tool has an incremental backup system which means that it is smart enough to skip those files whose backup has been taken in the previous mail backup proceedings. Moreover, there will be no repetition of the data and users can locate them with complete ease. Also, the tool works independently as it is based on high-level automation which can accomplish the entire task automatically by itself. Users don’t have to participate in the software while backup proceedings are going on. Some Advanced Features Of Mail Backup X Are As Listed Below: • The Users Do Not Know How To Backup Thunderbird Email Can Also Use Mail Backup X, Effectively: This tool is designed for everybody to use it. In simple words, users having basic knowledge of computers can also Backup Thunderbird Mac without any hassles. The system generates on-screen wizards at every step to assist the users. Such instructions are written in a simplified and lucid form so that professionals, as well as the novice users, can understand them with ease. • Download The Free Demo Of Mail Backup X Take Unlimited Thunderbird Backup Without Paying Any Cost: The company has launched the 15 days free demo trial for those users who have doubts relating to its performance. The company has not locked any of its features so that users can have a bright idea about its performance. During the free trial period, Users can export up to 10 files in one process. Limited exportation of files is the only constraint of free demo version; if you want to break this restriction, you should buy its paid license package for a lifetime. • Mail Backup X Can Also Play The Role Of Email Conversion Tool With Great Perfection: This email backup software has advanced data conversion engine that is mostly used by professional conversion tools. Through this, users can convert any mail to any file format that is supported by almost all the major email clients. It will come up with complete, appropriate and 100% accurate results with zero file damages. Thus, users do not need to purchase additional data converter; Mail Backup X can flawlessly restore their email archives in the format of their choice without any compatibility issues. • Mail Backup X Come Up With Advanced Emailing Services Which Makes Your Thunderbird Email Backup Process A Piece Of Cake: Inventpure’s Mail Backup X not only takes mail backups from all the major email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. but also supports IMAP and POP services by directly operating on your Mac system. More than that, it can save your emails in PDF format for quick conversion from soft copies into hard copies.
Maddy Roby
The natural mistake engineers make is to build from the bottom up. They leave the user interface last, assuming it is the least complex technology. This is wrong. Humans are much more complex than software, and since the interface has to interact with people, it's the most difficult to do well. By building from the bottom up, technologists paint themselves into a corner, resulting in ugly, hard-to-use things. By the time they finally got to the user interface work, so many constraints exist that even the best designers in the world couldn't salvage the project. The answer is simple: design the user interface first. This is a mandate at any organization that makes things people love to use.
Scott Berkun (The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work)
Most businesses hustle to create revenue, pay out their various expenses, and with any luck, there’s a little profit left over for the owners.  Here’s what you’re probably learning in business school: Revenue minus expenses equals profits.  Sounds sensible, right?”  He paused for the group of nodding heads.  “Well, it’s not!  It is completely backwards.  It should be taught:  Revenue minus PROFITS equal expenses.” Our chaperoning professors did their best to hide their cloudy faces, but it was clear Mr. X didn’t mind offending them.  “Don’t wait to see if there’s anything left over for a profit.  By carving out a margin before you address expenses, you create a constraint on the resources available.  This constraint unlocks your creativity to meet customers’ needs, streamline operations, and only spend money on that which truly generates value.  There’s no room left for fluff and bloat.  Difficult decisions on how you should run your business become obvious. No longer fat, dumb and happy, maybe you make that extra sales call or hold off on that unnecessary expense.  Business is very competitive, and the difference between the Hall of Fame and the graveyard can be remarkably thin.  Everyone says they want to run a tight ship, but the best way to harness your entrepreneurial verve is to tie your own hands to the yarak mast.  It will turn all of your business SHOULDS into business MUSTS.  I’ve spent a lot of time finding different places to apply the idea of yarak, and it never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is.  So that’s my eighty-twenty secret.  Shh… don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.
Jacob Taylor (The Rebel Allocator)
The success of these projects and others like them is thanks to developers. The millions of programmers across the world who use, develop, improve, document, and rely upon open source are the main reason it’s relevant, and the main reason it continues to grow. In return for this support, open source has set those developers free from traditional procurement. Forever. Financial constraints that once served as a barrier to entry in software not only throttled the rate and pace of innovation in the industry, they ensured that organizational developers were a subservient class at best, a cost center at worst. With the rise of open source, however, developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses  —  only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift.
Stephen O’Grady (The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World)
The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy. Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what's natural. Whatever I've enjoyed in these vast fields I've enjoyed because I don't live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is. Civilization is an education in nature. Artificiality is the path for appreciating what's natural. We should never, however, take the artificial for the natural. It's the harmony between the natural and the artificial that constitutes the natural state of the superior human soul.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
3. The site • Thoroughly investigate the spaces you are designing for by taking photographs, drawing and measuring. • Measure loading bays and delivery doors to determine a maximum size for exhibits and display devices that will be taken through them into the display area. • Analyze and develop exhibition content to see how it might best work within the physical constraints of the exhibition area. • Determine which walls and internal structures can be moved to facilitate displaying the exhibits. • Examine the route from the building entrance to the exhibition space.
Philip Hughes (Exhibition Design)
best questions. “The world of the designer changes,” explains Bass, “from the form maker to the person that creates the goals and the constraints of the object to be designed—[and that person] then no longer creates the designs, but selects the design from a landscape of possibilities. We’re going from what was once a point solution to more of a collaboration [between man and machine], because with the computer’s help, the designer is now able to understand the whole range [of any system] beyond what any human mind can comprehend on its own.” The
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
When we embrace our constraints, we begin to scale our work based on results, not theory or trends.
Jay Acunzo (Break the Wheel: Question Best Practices, Hone Your Intuition, and Do Your Best Work)
Work out example problems yourself, without looking at the solutions. (If you have to peek partway through, after you finish the problem, go back and do the whole problem again.) Try to recall the key points from a book, article, or paper. Look away and see if you can recall the key idea or ideas. If what you’re reading is difficult, it’s best to pause and try to recall after each page of what you’re reading. Formulate your own questions about the material. Take practice tests, preferably under time pressure that simulates the actual time constraints of the test. Find ways to re-explain key ideas from your notes or textbook in simpler terms, as if you’re explaining them to a child. Work with others, either another person or a small group—meet and discuss the concepts, give mini-lectures, and compare approaches.
Barbara Oakley (Learn Like a Pro: Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything)
Even with popular role models, some people are afraid to part with religious belief. Many Americans, even those who have become disillusioned by their religion, are uncomfortable at the thought of a life without religion. Without a traditional religious framework, where would they find meaning or joy? But there's no need to view this freedom with such trepidation. The possibilities for a meaningful and joyful life free from traditional religion are limitless. Knowing how best to solve problems, that you are free from arbitrary constraints of thought, and that you can live a life of real meaning is exhilarating.
Roy Speckhardt (Creating Change Through Humanism)
As Walter Ulbricht tightened his grip on all facets of the GDR and the standard of living decreased under the economic constraints of a “command economy” through the latter half of the 1950s, so the migration to the West of the best of his workforce rapidly increased, escaping via the safest route—through the open borders of Berlin.
Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth)
Both mindfulness and meditation hold an underlying premise that our minds should be softly directed. We are teaching them a new relationship with intrusive thoughts. When a thought appears during either of these practices, we notice it but do not become engaged with it. Some imagine thoughts as clouds that visit, and then visualize them floating off or popping like a bubble, because where the thoughts are heading, we do not follow. This is the line of demarcation. In white space we may follow thought. We may follow ideas. We dismiss constraints fully. That dog may run through the park without the leash. With ultimate freedom, our minds explore, stretch, and recover.
Juliet Funt (A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work)
Morality is not first and foremost about restriction and constraint. It's about human flourishing. It’s also about the deepest sort of happiness. And it’s about living a good life, which is, in fact, the best life. It’s all about what you honor, cultivate, do, and become. It’s common to think of any rules and structures
Tom Morris (Philosophy For Dummies)
Economics and P&L What are the per-unit economics of the device? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit? What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product? How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on? For this section of the PR/FAQ, ideally one or more members of your finance team will work with you to understand and capture these costs so you can include a simplified table of the per-unit economics and a mini P&L in the document. A resourceful entrepreneur or product manager can do this work themselves if they do not have a finance manager or team. For new products, the up-front investment is a major consideration. In the case of Melinda, there is a requirement for 77 people to work on the hardware and software, for an annualized cost of roughly $15 million. This means that the product idea needs to have the potential to earn well in excess of $15 million per year in gross profit to be worth building. The consumer questions and economic analysis both have an effect on the product price point, and that price point, in turn, has an effect on the size of the total addressable market. Price is a key variable in the authoring of your PR/FAQ. There may be special assumptions or considerations that have informed your calculation of the price point—perhaps making it relatively low or unexpectedly high—that need to be called out and explained. Some of the best new product proposals set a not-to-exceed price point because it forces the team to innovate within that constraint and face the tough trade-offs early on. The problem(s) associated with achieving that price point should be fully explained and explored in the FAQ.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right. Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us - a manual for living well and for survival. The quality of its writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. It would range from simple things such as how to light a fire, to our place in the solar system and the universe. It would be a primer of philosophy and science - it would provide a top-down look at the Earth and us. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of medicine, including the ciculation of the blood, the role of the organs. The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infectious diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost. In its time the Bible set the constraints for behaviour and for health. WE need a new book like the Bible that would serve in the same way but acknowledge science. It would explain properties like temperature, the meaning of their scales of measurement and how to measure them. It would list the periodic table of the elements. It would give an account of the air, the rocks, and the oceans. It would give schoolchildren of today a proper understanding of our civilization and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It would also be the survival manual for our successors. A book that was readily available should disaster happen. It would help bring science back as part of our culture and be an inheritance. Whatever else may be wrong with science, it still provides the best explanation we have of the material world.
James Lovelock (We Belong to Gaia (Green Ideas))
Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you’ll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows—all magnificent. Curated to your taste. This is the essence of great art. We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints. Consider it an offering, a devotional act. We do the best, as we see the best—with our own taste. No one else’s. We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves.
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what’s natural. Whatever I’ve enjoyed in these vast fields I’ve enjoyed because I don’t live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is. Civilization is an education in nature. Artificiality is the path for appreciating what’s natural. We should never, however, take the artificial for the natural. It’s the harmony between the natural and the artificial that constitutes the natural state of the superior human soul.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
When we are open, strong and fluid in our body, we are experiencing the best that life has to offer with very little limitation or constraints.
Dashama Konah Gordon (Journey to Joyful: Transform Your Life with Pranashama Yoga)
Lync has its title altered. And so what sort of computer software is it now? Well, it is identified as Lync Mac Business. The particular motive for carrying this out is a need to combine the familiar experience and level of popularity from consumers associated with Lync Mac along with security regarding Lync as well as control feature set. Yet another thing which Lync has got influenced in this specific new version of Lync happens to be the transformation associated with particular graphical user interface aspects which are used in the popular program of Lync Mac. It has been chose to utilize the same icons as in Lync as an alternative to attempting to make new things. Microsoft Company furthermore included the particular call monitor screen which happens to be applied within Lync in order that consumers could preserve an active call seen inside a small display when customers happen to be focusing on yet another program. It is additionally essential to point out that absolutely no features which were obtainable in Lync are already eliminated. And you should additionally understand that Lync Mac happens to be nevertheless utilizing the foundation regarding Lync. And it is very good that the actual software is nevertheless operating on the previous foundation since it happens to be known for the security. However what helps make Lync Mac a great choice if perhaps you're searching for an immediate texting software? There are a wide range of advantages which this particular application has got and we'll have a look at a few of these. Changing from instantaneous messaging towards document sharing won't take a great deal of time. Essentially, it provides a flawless incorporation associated with the software program. An improved data transfer administration is yet another factor that you'll be in a position enjoy from this program. Network supervisors can assign bandwidth, limit people and also split video and audio streams throughout each application and control the effect of bandwidth. In case you aren't making use of Microsoft Windows operating system and prefer Lync in that case possibly you're concerned that you will not be able to utilize this particular application or it is going to possess some constraints? The reply happens to be no. As we've talked about many times currently, Lync is currently best-known as being Lync For Mac Business .There is nothing that is actually extracted from the main edition therefore the full functionality is actually offered for you. And it is certainly great to understand the fact that Lync that we should simply call Lync For Mac version is actually capable to provide you all the characteristics which you'll need. If you happen to be trying to find a fantastic application for your own organization, in that case this is the one particular you are in search of Lync For Mac which will still be acknowledged as being Lync for a long period edition is actually competent to present you with everything that is actually necessary for your organization even if you decided to not utilize Microsoft operating system. Know about more detail please visit lyncmac.com
Addan smith
Set the table: Decide exactly what you want. Clarity is essential. Write out your goals and objectives before you begin. Plan every day in advance: Think on paper. Every minute you spend in planning can save you five or ten minutes in execution. Apply the 80/20 Rule to everything: Twenty percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. Always concentrate your efforts on that top 20 percent. Consider the consequences: Your most important tasks and priorities are those that can have the most serious consequences, positive or negative, on your life or work. Focus on these above all else. Practice creative procrastination: Since you can't do everything, you must learn to deliberately put off those tasks that are of low value so that you have enough time to do the few things that really count. Use the ABCDE Method continually: Before you begin work on a list of tasks, take a few moments to organize them by value and priority so you can be sure of working on your most important activities. Focus on key result areas: Identify and determine those results that you absolutely, positively have to get to do your job well, and work on them all day long. The Law of Three: Identify the three things you do in your work that account for 90 percent of your contribution, and focus on getting them done before anything else. You will then have more time for your family and personal life. Prepare thoroughly before you begin: Have everything you need at hand before you start. Assemble all the papers, information, tools, work materials, and numbers you might require so that you can get started and keep going. Take it one oil barrel at a time: You can accomplish the biggest and most complicated job if you just complete it one step at a time. Upgrade your key skills: The more knowledgeable and skilled you become at your key tasks, the faster you start them and the sooner you get them done. Leverage your special talents: Determine exactly what it is that you are very good at doing, or could be very good at, and throw your whole heart into doing those specific things very, very well. Identify your key constraints: Determine the bottlenecks or choke points, internal or external, that set the speed at which you achieve your most important goals, and focus on alleviating them. Put the pressure on yourself: Imagine that you have to leave town for a month, and work as if you had to get all your major tasks completed before you left. Maximize your personal power: Identify your periods of highest mental and physical energy each day, and structure your most important and demanding tasks around these times. Get lots of rest so you can perform at your best. Motivate yourself into action: Be your own cheerleader. Look for the good in every situation. Focus on the solution rather than the problem. Always be optimistic and constructive. Get out of the technological time sinks: Use technology to improve the quality of your communications, but do not allow yourself to become a slave to it. Learn to occasionally turn things off and leave them off. Slice and dice the task: Break large, complex tasks down into bite-sized pieces, and then do just one small part of the task to get started. Create large chunks of time: Organize your days around large blocks of time where you can concentrate for extended periods on your most important tasks. Develop a sense of urgency: Make a habit of moving fast on your key tasks. Become known as a person who does things quickly and well. Single handle every task: Set clear priorities, start immediately on your most important task, and then work without stopping until the job is 100 percent complete. This is the real key to high performance and maximum personal productivity.
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
will argue that: We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?). We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions. We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.
Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less)
At the same time, some sexual practices are much more common than others. Moderate polygyny, for instance, is exceedingly common; polyandry is not. Compulsory homosexuality is not unheard-of, but is far less common than compulsory heterosexuality. The best way to formulate a "biological" explanation for these phenomena is not in terms of the adaptiveness of the practices, but in terms of a set of unconscious cognitive structures or somatic responses that bias cultural reproduction in the direction of one or another practice
Joseph Heath (Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint)
Today, as yesterday and tomorrow, the church speaks a language of respect for public officeholders, whose vocation is shaped by the constraints of law; but the church, today as yesterday and tomorrow, also speaks as best she can to judge the actions and decisions of public officials, and the culture shaped by them, when these are inadequate to the vision given us by the truths of faith.
Francis E. George
Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).
Anonymous
While those of us in schools may wish to blame others for imposing constraints, many of our constraints are self imposed. Are we able to escape from these and respond to what we believe is best for our students? One
David Loader (The Inner Principal: Reflections on Educational Leadership)
The question is: Which means best advances the regulator’s goal, subject to the constraints (whether normative or material) that the regulator must recognize? My
Lawrence Lessig (Code version 2.0)
Consider the divergent paths of the United States and Mexico. Blaming this disparity on the ignorance of the leaders of the two nations is, at best, highly implausible. It wasn’t differences in knowledge or intentions between John Smith and Cortés that laid the seeds of divergence during the colonial period, and it wasn’t differences in knowledge between later U.S. presidents, such as Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, and Porfirio Díaz that made Mexico choose economic institutions that enriched elites at the expense of the rest of society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries while Roosevelt and Wilson did the opposite. Rather, it was the differences in the institutional constraints the countries’ presidents and elites were facing. Similarly, leaders of African nations that have languished over the last half century under insecure property rights and economic institutions, impoverishing much of their populations, did not allow this to happen because they thought it was good economics; they did so because they could get away with it and enrich themselves at the expense of the rest, or because they thought it was good politics, a way of keeping themselves in power by buying the support of crucial groups or elites. The
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
Vala Afshar, chief marketing officer of Extreme Networks, is an interesting case study.3 Trained as an electrical engineer, Afshar joined Extreme Networks in 1996 as a software developer/quality service engineer, eventually transitioning to run the services business, becoming the chief customer support officer. In this role, Afshar became very active on Salesforce's Chatter, a private social network for business, and by 2011 had built a large internal following. As the chief information officer took note of Afshar's intracompany influence, he signed Afshar up for Twitter and gave him the mandate to interact with networks outside of the company. As Afshar prototyped his ideas in real time, he gained an external following. A publisher approached him about writing a book; his presentations on Slide-Share gained more than one million views; and he was promoted to chief marketing officer. Vala Afshar has become a thought leader, epitomizing a new breed of chief marketing officer, both highly social and highly technical—and Extreme Networks has unusually high name recognition for a $500 million company. Afshar's ability to shrink the space, getting immediate and actionable feedback, was pivotal in expanding his space into a high-profile public role. Fast feedback is also useful when it comes to identifying your distinctive strengths. Karen May, VP for people development at Google, invented a method she calls "speedback." It works like this: "partway through a training session she will tell everyone to pair off and sit knee to knee, and give them three minutes to answer one simple question: 'What advice would you give me based on the experience you've had with me here?' Participants say that it's some of the best feedback they've ever gotten."4 When we are willing to impose constraints—in this particular, instance, time—we have a better chance of identifying what is working and what needs to be changed.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
...[T]he teaching of writing is fraught with difficulties. Teaching well, in my experience and that of my students, can be very time-consuming, demanding, frustrating, and, given institutional constraints, sometimes infuriating. It demands the recognition that, in Burns's words, 'The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay.' At the same time, composition lies at the heart of education. When students make gains as writers, the gains are likely to affect other educational endeavors. And for teachers, the joy of seeing students create some new part of themselves, and do it well, washes the difficulties to insignificance and provides the impetus to try, like the Bruce's unrelenting spider, again, and again, and again.
George Hillocks (Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (Language and Literacy Series))
keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that IT is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what’s natural. Whatever I’ve enjoyed in these vast fields I’ve enjoyed because I don’t live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don't all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediately palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what we can call love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.
Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them. 2. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?). 3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions. 4. We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible. 5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing
Anonymous
optimization under constraints,” and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality
John Brockman (Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction in Life and Markets (Best of Edge Series))
Here is a “Confession of Love” that she drew up for a group of Indian girls who banded together to serve Christ. Perhaps it best says to us just what Amy Carmichael believed about Christian life and service. My Vow: Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, by Thy grace I will do it. My Constraint: Thy love, O Christ, my Lord. My Confidence: Thou art able to keep that which I have committed unto thee. My Joy: To do Thy will, O God. My Discipline: That which I would not choose, but which Thy love appoints. My Prayer: Conform my will to Thine. My Motto: Love to live—live to love. My Portion: The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance. With that kind of devotion and dedication, is it any wonder that Amy Carmichael was misunderstood by believers, persecuted by unbelievers, attacked by Satan, and blessed by the Lord? Unpredictable? Yes—but not unblessable! We could use a few more like her in Christian service today.
Warren W. Wiersbe (10 People Every Christian Should Know (Ebook Shorts))
FUNCTIONAL SAFETY AS PER IEC 61511 SIF SIS SIL TRAINING FUNCTIONAL SAFETY COURSE OBJECTIVES: The main objective of this training program is to give engineers involved in safety instrumented systems the opportunity to learn about functional safety, current applicable safety standards (IEC 61511) and their requirements. The Participants will be able to learn to follow: • Understand the basic requirements of the functional safety standards (IEC 61511) • The meaning of SIS, SIF, SIL and other functional safety terminology • Differentiate between safety functions and control functions • The role of Hazard and Risk analysis in setting SIL targets• • Create basic designs of safety instrumented systems considering architectural constraints • Different type of failures and best practices for minimizing them • Understand the effect of redundancy, diagnostics, proof test intervals, hardware fault tolerance on the SIL • The responsibility of operation and maintenance to ensure a SIF meets its SIL • How to proof test a SIF The Benefits for the Participants: At the conclusion of the training, the participants will be able to: Participate effectively in SIL determination with Risk graph, Risk matrix, and LOPA methodology Determine whether the design of a Safety Instrumented Function meets the required SIL. Select a SIF architecture that both meets the required SIL and minimizes spurious trips. Select SIF components to meet the target SIL for that SIF Target Audience: Instrument and Control Design and maintenance engineers Process Engineers Process Plant Operation Engineers Functional safety Management Engineers For Registration Email Us On techsupport@marcepinc.com or call us on 022-30210100
Amin Badu
But even during an event as exceptional as the world famous troubadour's just concluded performance, the travelers kept to themselves remaining in clearly delineated groups. Elves stayed with elves. Dwarvish craftsman gathered with their kin who would often hide to protect their merchant caravans and were armed to the teeth. The groups tolerated at best the gnome miners and halfling farmers who camped beside them. All non-humans were uniformly distant towards humans. The humans re-payed in kind but were not seem to mix amongst themselves either. Nobility looked down on the merchants and traveling salesman with open scorn. While soldiers and mercenaries, distanced themselves from shepherds and their reeking sheepskins. The few wizards and their disciples, kept themselves entirely apart from the others and bestowed their arrogance on everyone in equal parts. A tied knit, dark and silent group of peasants lurked in the background resembling a forest with their rakes, pitchforks and flails, poking above their heads. They were ignored by all. The exception, as ever was the children. Freed from the constraints of silence which have been enforced during the bards performance, the children dashed into the woods with wild cries and enthusiastically immersed themselves in a game whose rules were incomprehensible to all those who have bidden farewell to the happy years of childhood. Children of elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half elves, quarter elves and toddlers of mysterious provenance, neither knew or recognized racial or social divisions. At least, not yet.
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher Boxed Set (The Witcher, #1-3))
Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.
Joseph Loscalzo (Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics)
Thus he was old enough to remember the freedom that had prevailed in the canyon country before the hordes of tourists had started pouring in, back when a man could launch a boat and disappear downriver without having to ask for permission or wait in line, devoid of any constraints other than those imposed by the water and the rocks, an adventure in the best sense of the word. And as those days receded ever further into the rearview mirror, there were moments—right now being one of them—when Thomas was forced to wonder about it all. In truth, no one who had tasted those liberties could look back on that time with anything other than a deep sense of longing. Like everyone else who had known the river during that era of innocence, Thomas mourned its passing and privately grieved that it would never return. Which is why part of him sometimes rebelled at the very restrictions he sought to enforce, if only because rules—even rules that were universally accepted as necessary and good—seemed to cut so directly against the spirit that the river had once embodied. This sense of loss now prompted Thomas to ponder a notion that was not merely unorthodox but, when viewed from a certain angle, downright subversive. Was it possible, he wondered, that a measure of what had been lost—the thing that had once defined the essence of this place, the thing that was now in the process of disappearing forever—was that very thing perhaps being offered a chance to express itself one more time, fleetingly, irresponsibly, nobly, right here before him?
Kevin Fedarko (The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon)
Eternity is not just simple promise of life after death. It gives us a vision beyond our earthly experience, essential for creating the best version of ourselves without time constraints. An infinite path of spiritual development, it offers us freedom to progress and draw closer to our Creator, freely, patiently, confidently, and without fear. This vision of eternity invites reflection on the continuity of our spiritual existence and our aspiration for deeper harmony.
Marie Chieze (Words of the Shaman: 50 Quotes from Paching Hoé Lambaiho (Ancestral Wisdom to Transform Your Life))
How will it work when everyone is exactly equal?” my mother wanted to know. “Is there enough, really, to go around?” I was appalled by this sentiment, so chauvinist, racist, survivalist. I railed at her about the capitalist racket, the smallness of her Depression-era mindset (“But I don’t have a mindset,” she protested. “I have questions”). She was a good sport about it, really, mild-mannered in the face of my patronizing. But she persisted: Wouldn’t there always be some way people sorted themselves? If it wasn’t race or gender or class, would it be intelligence? Physical strength? Blood type? Weren’t there always bound to be haves and have-nots on account of finite resources? The constraints of weather and geography, for instance? Who got the high ground with fertile soil versus who got the desert? I think she honestly wanted to discuss this, but to me she sounded like a social Darwinist. I could see things only in oppositional terms. Today I’d love to have this conversation with her. I have an answer: The process of working toward greater equality is the point. The medium is the message. The journey is the destination. Something like that. It’s the effort to make life more equal, more bearable for everyone, that counts. And if we don’t try, what are we left with? A lifetime of showing off our most selfish instincts, protecting our own little slice of whatever it is we want—power, money, resources, the best seats on the bus. Life may be filled with struggle but what you struggle for is what matters. And if it’s only your own survival, you’re no better than the dinosaurs.
Jessica Shattuck (Last House)
We are big fans of the agile software movement. In 2001, seventeen software developers met in Snowbird, Utah, and published the “Manifesto for Agile Software.” The four main values in the manifesto remind us how the best friction fixers think and act: (1) “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; (2) “working software over comprehensive documentation”; (3) “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”; and (4) “responding to change over following a plan.” Agile software teams deliver their work in small increments rather than in one “big bang” launch. Rather than following a rigid plan, they constantly evaluate results and constraints and update the software, and how they work, along the way.
Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
Even under the best of circumstances, sexual experience does not – indeed cannot – transfer in any simple fashion form one generation or one body to another. Each of us has our own particular body, mind, history, and soul to get to know, with all our particular kinks, confusions, traumas, aporias, legacies, orientations, sensitivities, abilities, and drives. We do not get to know these features in a single night, a year, or even a decade. Nor is whatever knowledge we gain likely to hold throughout the course of a life (or even a relationship, or a single encounter). None of us is born knowing how to manage our sexual drives and disappointments; none of us is born knowing how to content with the various limitations, persecutions, and allowances of sexual freedom society has prepared for us prior to our arrival. We can work against noxious norms and laws that curtail sexual and reproductive freedom; we can create generations of people less likely to be injured, persecuted, or driven to self-harm on account of gender or sexuality; we can educate each other about mutuality and communication, the location of the clitoris, and difference beyond a gender binary; we can challenge ourselves to accept “benign sexual variation”…: these are a few good starts. But each sexual exchange – particularly once performed with partners you haven't repeatedly had sex with, but even then – is going to resemble a certain wandering into the woods, because of the fundamental unknowability of ourselves and each other, and the open question of what any new interaction might summon.
Maggie Nelson (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint)
When Bill Wyman left, in 1991, I got extremely stroppy. I really did have a go at him. I wasn’t very nice. He said he didn’t like to fly anymore. He had been driving to every gig because he’d developed a fear of flying. That’s not an excuse—get outta here! I couldn’t believe it. I’d been in some of the most ramshackle aircraft in the world with that guy and he’d never batted an eyelid. But I guess it’s something that one can develop. Or maybe he did a computer analysis. He was very into that. Bill had one of the first. It satisfied that meticulous mind of his, I suppose. He probably got something out of the computer, like the odds against you after flying so many miles. I don’t know why he’s so worried about dying. It’s not a matter of avoiding it. It’s where and how! But then what did he do? Having freed himself by luck and talent from the constraints of society, that one-in-ten-million chance, he goes back into it, into the retail trade, putting his energy into opening up a pub. Why would you leave the best band in the fucking world to open a fish-and-chip shop called Sticky Fingers? Taking one of our titles with him. It seems to be doing well.
Keith Richards (Life)
When Bill Wyman left, in 1991, I got extremely stroppy. I really did have a go at him. I wasn’t very nice. He said he didn’t like to fly anymore. He had been driving to every gig because he’d developed a fear of flying. That’s not an excuse—get outta here! I couldn’t believe it. I’d been in some of the most ramshackle aircraft in the world with that guy and he’d never batted an eyelid. But I guess it’s something that one can develop. Or maybe he did a computer analysis. He was very into that. Bill had one of the first. It satisfied that meticulous mind of his, I suppose. He probably got something out of the computer, like the odds against you after flying so many miles. I don’t know why he’s so worried about dying. It’s not a matter of avoiding it. It’s where and how! But then what did he do? Having freed himself by luck and talent from the constraints of society, that one-in-ten-million chance, he goes back into it, into the retail trade, putting his energy into opening up a pub. Why would you leave the best band in the fucking world to open a fish-and-chip shop called Sticky Fingers? Taking one of our titles with him. It seems to be doing well. Not so Ronnie’s similarly inexplicable foray into the catering trade, always a nightmare of keeping people’s fingers out of the till. Josephine’s dream was to have a spa. They opened it, it was a disaster, it fell apart and went down in a blaze of insolvency proceedings.
Keith Richards (Life)
This idea—that what parents need or want will play a role in choices—can be hard to admit. In a sense, I think this is at the core of a lot of the “Mommy War” conflicts. We all want to be good parents. We want our choices to be the right ones. So, after we make the choices, there is a temptation to decide they are the perfect ones. Psychology has a name for this: avoiding cognitive dissonance. If I choose not to breastfeed, I don’t want to acknowledge that there are even small possible benefits to breastfeeding. So I encamp myself in the position that breastfeeding is a waste of time. On the other side, if I spend two years taking my boobs out every three hours, I need to believe that this is what it takes to deliver a life of continued successes to my child. This is a deeply human temptation, but it is also really counterproductive. Your choices can be right for you but also not necessarily the best choices for other people. Why? You are not other people. Your circumstances differ. Your preferences differ. In the language of economics, your constraints differ.
Emily Oster (Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool)
Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.” By contrast, President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
Amazon’s Leadership Principles6 Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Ownership. Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say, “that’s not my job.” Invent and Simplify. Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time. Are Right, A Lot. Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. Learn and Be Curious. Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them. Hire and Develop the Best. Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice. Insist on the Highest Standards. Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. Bias for Action. Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. Frugality. Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense. Earn Trust. Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
visual-spatial learning styles, do not do their best in timed tests and/or multiple-choice question tests, especially if not appropriately constructed (Silverman, 2002). These students are usually better abstract thinkers, and the said type of assessment would, in many cases, not test their abilities appropriately (mostly they are set purely as memory recall test or at least students’ approach them in that way especially because of the time constraints).
Chandana Watagodakumbura (Education from a Deeper and Multidisciplinary Perspective: Enhanced by Relating to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Based on Mindfulness, Self-Awareness & Emotional Intelligence)
whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. We must fix that if we can. It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet? Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it. She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.
Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others)
What was that about the family investment project?” she asks. “Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. “Not that I expect you to care.” Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen—” “Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily. “In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn’t optimized for it—we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time—we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth—but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.” “You tell ’em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare. “Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
The double diverge-converge process is quite effective at freeing designers from unnecessary restrictions to the problem and solution spaces. But you can sympathize with a product manager who, having given the designers a problem to solve, finds them questioning the assignment and insisting on traveling all over the world to seek deeper understanding. Even when the designers start focusing upon the problem, they do not seem to make progress, but instead develop a wide variety of ideas and thoughts, many only half-formed, many clearly impractical. All this can be rather unsettling to the product manager who, concerned about meeting the schedule, wants to see immediate convergence. To add to the frustration of the product manager, as the designers start to converge upon a solution, they may realize that they have inappropriately formulated the problem, so the entire process must be repeated (although it can go more quickly this time). This repeated divergence and convergence is important in properly determining the right problem to be solved and then the best way to solve it. It looks chaotic and ill-structured, but it actually follows well-established principles and procedures. How does the product manager keep the entire team on schedule despite the apparent random and divergent methods of designers? Encourage their free exploration, but hold them to the schedule (and budget) constraints. There is nothing like a firm deadline to get creative minds to reach convergence.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
It is always best to remember that the people you are dealing with are not competitors, allies, enemies, or friends—they are just people who, like you, have interests, constraints, alternatives, and perspectives (ICAP).
Deepak Malhotra (Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts (without Money or Muscle))
Hayek disagreed with the widespread idea that large industrial economies required planning. To the contrary, he argued it was only the hidden hand of the market—what he would later term spontaneous order—that could bring structure to an infinitely complex web of interdependent economic relationships. Along the lines of Frank Knight and Henry Simons, Hayek contended that the allocation in a mass society was best handled by the price system. Only prices could instantaneously respond to a multivalent onrush of human wants, desires, and constraints. Planners would always be one beat behind. Their plans would distort and disorient buyers and sellers.
Jennifer Burns (Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative)
Finally, the last point that I want to make – and this is really the bottom line and the most important – is that even if we concede that the professional historian, as a member of 'The Guild', must act under the constraint of methodological naturalism (that is to say, under the methodological constraint that you can only infer natural causes for natural events), the question remains: why should we be under any such constraint? Why can't I, as a philosopher or just a human being, judge that the best explanation of the facts is a miraculous explanation? Indeed, why can't the historian in his off-hours, so to speak, make this inference? Wouldn't it be a tragedy if we were prevented from knowing the truth about reality simply because of a methodological constraint? That would seem insane. So apart from some good reason for thinking that inference to a supernatural explanation is somehow irrational, I don't see any reason why we, when we are not acting as professional historians, should be prohibited from making a supernatural inference and being constrained by some sort of mere methodological restriction.
William Lane Craig
Nevertheless, girls were brought up to regard their virginity as something sacrosant, prudery was the rule, hysterical breakdowns were frequent. Men, single or not, went to obtain from actresses or working girls what the women of their own milieu longed to give them but could not, for their honour stood in the way. A respectable woman, in Vienna as elsewhere, did not possess a body. If she discovered she did have one, then the devil must have got into the holy water. Once her sexuality was aroused, the irripressible violence of her instincts, her natural propensity to lewdness, would be unleashed. Women had to be defended against themselves, by education and constraint. And it was from them, insatiable women with thighs outspread, that men must be protected if they were not to lose the best of themselves. For a lustful woman diverted a man from the intellectual preoccupations of which he had the monopoly, she distracted his energies from superior accomplishments, she was the natural enemy of morality, reason, and creativity.
Françoise Giroud (Alma Mahler, or, The Art of Being Loved)
In social crisis and political revolution, when a government breaks down, power falls into the hands of the working masses; and for the propertied class, for capitalism arises the problem how to wrest it out of their hands. So it was in the past, so it may happen in the future. Democracy is the means, the appropriate instrument of persuasion. The arguments of formal and legal equality have to induce the workers to give up their power and to let their organization be inserted as a subordinate part into the State structure. Against this the workers have to carry in them a strong conviction that council organization is a higher and more perfect form of equality. It realizes social equality; it is the form of equality adapted to a society consciously dominating production and life. It might be asked whether the term democracy fits here, because the ending—"-cracy"—indicates domination by force, which here is lacking. Though the individuals have to conform to the whole there is no government above the people; people itself is government. Council organization is the very means by which working mankind, without need of a ruling government, organizes its vital activities. Adhering, then, to the emotional value attached of old to the word democracy we may say that council organization represents the higher form of democracy, the true democracy of labor. Political democracy, middle-class democracy, at its best can be no more than a formal democracy; it gives the same legal rights to everybody, but does not care whether this implies security of life; because economic life, because production is not concerned. The worker has his equal right to sell his labor power; but he is not certain that he will be able to sell it. Council democracy, on the contrary, is actual democracy since it secures life to all collaborating producers, free and equal masters of the sources of their life. The equal right in deciding needs not to be secured by any formal regulating paragraph; it is realized in that the work, in every part, is regulated by those who do the work. That parasites taking no part in production automatically exclude themselves from taking part in the decisions, cannot be considered as a lack in democracy; not their person but their function excludes them. It is often said that in the modern world the point of dispute is between democracy and dictatorship; and that the working class has to throw in its full weight for democracy. The real meaning of this statement of contrast is that capitalist opinion is divided whether capitalism better maintains its sway with soft deceitful democracy, or with hard dictatorial constraint. It is the old problem of whether rebellious slaves are kept down better by kindness or by terror. The slaves, if asked, of course prefer kind treatment to terror; but if they let themselves be fooled so as to mistake soft slavery for freedom, it is pernicious to the cause of their freedom. For the working class in the present time the real issue is between council organization, the true democracy of labor, and the apparent, deceitful middle-class democracy of formal rights. In proclaiming council democracy the workers transfer the fight from political form to economic contents. Or rather—since politics is only form and means for economy—for the sounding political slogan they substitute the revolutionizing political deed, the seizure of the means of production. The slogan of political democracy serves to detract the attention of the workers from their true goal. It must be the concern of the workers, by putting up the principle of council organization, of actual democracy of labor, to give true expression to the great issue now moving society.
Anton Pannekoek (Workers' Councils)
Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you'll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows - all magnificent. Curated to your taste. This is the essence of great art. We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints. Consider it an offering, a devotional act. We do the best, as we see the best - with our own taste. No one else's.
Rick Rubin
Regularity is what breeds conformance, satisfaction, allegiance. And though rigorous, the constraints of this sort of life go largely unnoticed, mainly because humans are highly trainable creatures, and most of us have been doing this since we were children. It's the most natural life to someone who has been taught that this is the only way to live, and we are told that it is the best way of life. and we believe it.
Amber Scorah (Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life)
American courts are not all-powerful institutions. They were designed with severe limitations and placed in a political system of divided powers. To ask them to produce significant social reform is to forget their history and ignore their constraints. It is to cloud our vision with a naive and romantic belief in the triumph of rights over politics. And while romance and even naivete have their charms, they are not best exhibited in courtrooms.
Gerald N. Rosenberg (The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?)
Remember-"All of your constraints are debatable.
Stephen Orban (Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT)
God as an idea; is limited by human comprehension. God as a person; is infinitely more sophisticated than our best example of a good, fair, moral and ethical human. God as an image; would be the idea that imagination under the proper constraints or laws will produce the most value.
R.A. Delmonico
relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.
Nicholas A. Christakis (Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society)