“
MEMORY'S SO
TREACHEROUS.
ONE MOMENT YOU'RE LOST IN A
CARNIVAL
OF
DELIGHTS,
WITH POIGNANT CHILDHOOD
AROMAS
, THE FLASHING NEON OF
PUBERTY,
ALL THAT SENTIMENTAL
CANDY-FLOSS
...
THE
NEXT
, IT LEADS YOU SOMEWHERE YOU DON'T WANT TO GO...
...SOMEWHERE
DARK
AND
COLD,
FILLED WITH THE DAMP, AMBIGUOUS SHAPES OF THINKS YOU'D HOPED WERE
FORGOTTEN.
MEMORIES
CAN BE
VILE, REPULSIVE
LITTLE
BRUTES.
LIKE
CHILDREN,
I SUPPOSE.
HAHA.
BUT CAN WE LIVE
WITHOUT
THEM?
MEMORIES
ARE WHAT OUR
REASON
IS BASED UPON. IF WE CAN'T
FACE
THEM, WE DENY REASON ITSELF!
ALGHOUGH, WHY
NOT?
WE AREN'T
CONTRACTUALLY TIED DOWN
TO
RATIONALITY!
THERE
IS
NO
SANITY CLAUSE!
SO WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF LOCKED ONTO AN UNPLEASANT TRAIN OF THOUGHT, HEADING FOR THE PLACES IN YOUR PAST WHERE THE SCREAMING IS
UNBEARABLE,
REMEMBER THERE'S ALWAYS
MADNESS.
MADNESS
IS THE
EMERGENCY EXIT...
YOU CAN JUST STEP
OUTSIDE,
AND CLOSE THE DOOR ON ALL THOSE DREADFUL THINGS THAT HAPPENED. YOU CAN LOCK THEM
AWAY...
FOREVER.
”
”
Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)
“
I don’t know why, because it’s one of those things I’m not contractually obligated to care about.
”
”
Martha Wells (All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1))
“
The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?
”
”
John Green
“
He won’t be diving straight for the human flesh. But a cat has got to eat, and you are the person who feeds him. This is the cat-human compact. Death doesn’t free you from performing your contractual obligations.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies)
“
Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. "The Past Tense," I suppose you'd call it. Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss... the next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten. Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause! So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever.
”
”
Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)
“
Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness... is an emergency exit.
”
”
Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)
“
No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth.
”
”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
“
I do love it when I am right,” Hyacinth said triumphantly.
“Which is fortunate, since I so often am.”
Penelope just looked at her. “You do know that you are
insufferable.”
“Of course.” Hyacinth leaned toward Penelope with a
devilish smile. “But you love me, anyway, admit it.”
“I admit nothing until the end of the evening.”
“After we have both gone deaf?”
“After we see if you behave yourself.”
Hyacinth laughed. “You married into the family. You
have to love me. It’s a contractual obligation.”
“Funny how I don’t recall that in the wedding vows.”
“Funny,” Hyacinth returned, “I remember it perfectly
”
”
Julia Quinn (It's in His Kiss (Bridgertons, #7))
“
The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
”
”
Daniel Todd Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior)
“
The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
”
”
Daniel Todd Gilbert
“
I had made the same mistake a lot of Christians make: I saw my connection with God as a contractual relationship, rather than a covenantal relationship. All contracts have terms, but covenants don’t. They last forever. In a contractual relationship, you’re always worried about breaking the rules. In a covenantal relationship, you’re only concerned with loving the other party as much as you can.
”
”
Lecrae Moore (Unashamed)
“
You're not supposed to be on the bed," he told the puppy. "It's contractually prohibited.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6))
“
now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?
”
”
Dan Savage (American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics)
“
Information is a significant component of most organizations’ competitive strategy either by the direct collection, management, and interpretation of business information or the retention of information for day-to-day business processing. Some of the more obvious results of IS failures include reputational damage, placing the organization at a competitive disadvantage, and contractual noncompliance. These impacts should not be underestimated.
”
”
Institute of Internal Auditors
“
You married into the family. You have to love me. It's a contractual obligation.
”
”
Julia Quinn (It's in His Kiss (Bridgertons, #7))
“
What in Tink's contractual hell are you doing here?
”
”
Kim Harrison (A Fistful of Charms (The Hollows, #4))
“
I was too busy destroying my life to bother with a minor detail like contractual obligation. I had veins to blow. A child to ignore. Friends to rip off. An apartment I hated on sight to pay for and move into.
”
”
Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight)
“
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
”
”
Victor Davis Hanson (Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power)
“
Now, even to me, it seemed ridiculous to concede that I had accumulated substantial debt and a few degrees so that I might contractually labor for the sake of having two free days a week in which to cook a meal in a kitchen I could not actually afford to own, for a small crowd of people my age who spent their lives do- ing the same
”
”
Jo Hamya (Three Rooms)
“
The true state will be oriented against both capitalism and communism. At its center will stand a principle of authority and a transcendent symbol of sovereignty…. The state is the primary element that precedes nation, people, and society. The state – and with the state everything that is properly constituted as political order and political reality – is defined essentially on the basis of an idea, not by naturalistic and contractual factors.
”
”
Julius Evola
“
There is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).
The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend's recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend's ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.
Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.
This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.
”
”
Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
“
Not as we are but as we must appear,
contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
desire life, but as they would have us live,
set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
each distant sphere of harmony forever
poised, unanswerable. It is without
consequence when we vaunt and suffer,
or if it is not, all echoes are the same
in such eternity. Then tell me, love,
how that should comfort us-or anyone
dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place
crying to the end ”I have not finished.”
From 'Funeral Music
”
”
Geoffrey Hill (Collected Poems)
“
The goal of ace liberation is simply the goal of true sexual and romantic freedom for everyone. A society that is welcoming to aces can never be compatible with rape culture; with misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia; with current hierarchies of romance and friendship; and with contractual notions of consent. It is a society that respects choice and highlights the pleasure that can be found everywhere in our lives. I believe that all this is possible.
”
”
Angela Chen (Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex)
“
The traditional, correct pre-Marxist view on exploitation was that of radical laissez-faire liberalism as espoused by, for instance, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. According to them, antagonistic interests do not exist between capitalists, as owners of factors of production, and laborers, but between, on the one hand, the producers in society, i.e., homesteaders, producers and contractors, including businessmen as well as workers, and on the other hand, those who acquire wealth non-productively and/or non-contractually, i.e., the state and state-privileged groups, such as feudal landlords.
”
”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy)
“
I don't know why, because it's one of those things I'm not contractually obligated to care about.
”
”
Martha Wells
“
There are three reasons I’m a poor candidate for high-end potions and lotions like the ones Tish was contractually bound to foist on me. I am cheap. I am lazy. I am impatient.
”
”
Kelly Corrigan
“
His hands came up to my cheeks, his mouth insistent on mine as he deepened the kiss. He had my lower lip between his teeth, giving a soft nibble while a whimper came from the back of my throat that didn't even sound like me. My nipples were tight and aching, rubbing his chest through the thin fabric of my bra. His hand slid under the fabric to cup my goosefleshed skin, his fingers rolling my nipple in a sensation so exquisite it almost hurt.
"You have great boobs," he murmured against my neck. "Can I say that?"
My bra was half-askew by now, one strap falling down my arm. "If my boobs are out, you're contractually obligated to say that.
”
”
Alicia Thompson (Love in the Time of Serial Killers)
“
The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians’ State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them, merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police. Within the family institution the Sicilian can cross the frontier of his own natural tragic solitude and fit into a communal life where relationships are governed by hair-splitting contractual ties. To ask him to cross the frontier between family and State would be too much. In imagination he may be carried away by the idea of the State and may even rise to being Prime Minister; but the precise and definite code of his rights and duties will remain within the family, whence the step towards victorious solitude is shorter.
”
”
Leonardo Sciascia (The Day of the Owl)
“
But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history; and accordingly it's my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere--longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.
”
”
Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)
“
A person is a person through other people. Ubuntu is Scanlon’s contractualism, but supercharged. It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them. Their health is our health, their happiness is our happiness, their interests are our interests, when they are hurt or diminished we are hurt or diminished.
”
”
Michael Schur (How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question)
“
Incidentally, the same logic that would force one to accept the idea of the production of security by private business as economically the best solution to the problem of consumer satisfaction also forces one, so far as moral-ideological positions are concerned, to abandon the political theory of classical liberalism and take the small but nevertheless decisive step (from there) to the theory of libertarianism, or private property anarchism. Classical liberalism, with Ludwig von Mises as its foremost representative in the twentieth century, advocates a social system based on the nonaggression principle. And this is also what libertarianism advocates. But classical liberalism then wants to have this principle enforced by a monopolistic agency (the government, the state)—an organization, that is, which is not exclusively dependent on voluntary, contractual support by the consumers of its respective services, but instead has the right to unilaterally determine its own income, i.e., the taxes to be imposed on consumers in order to do its job in the area of security production. Now, however plausible this might sound, it should be clear that it is inconsistent. Either the principle of nonaggression is valid, in which case the state as a privileged monopolist is immoral, or business built on and around aggression—the use of force and of noncontractual means of acquiring resources—is valid, in which case one must toss out the first theory. It is impossible to sustain both contentions and not to be inconsistent unless, of course, one could provide a principle that is more fundamental than both the nonaggression principle and the states’ right to aggressive violence and from which both, with the respective limitations regarding the domains in which they are valid, can be logically derived. However, liberalism never provided any such principle, nor will it ever be able to do so, since, to argue in favor of anything presupposes one’s right to be free of aggression. Given the fact then that the principle of nonaggression cannot be argumentatively contested as morally valid without implicitly acknowledging its validity, by force of logic one is committed to abandoning liberalism and accepting instead its more radical child: libertarianism, the philosophy of pure capitalism, which demands that the production of security be undertaken by private business too.
”
”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe (The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy)
“
Consider three more examples, this time of clashes between postmodernist theory and historical fact. Postmodernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever, and that it is only in places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive. They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without. They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.
”
”
Stephen R.C. Hicks (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault)
“
The reasoning throughout is straightforward, and is in full accord with what Bush calls “new thinking in the law of war,” which takes international law and treaties to be “private contractual rules” that the more powerful party “is free to apply or disregard as it sees fit”: sternly enforced to ensure a safer world for investors, but quaint and obsolete when they constrain Washington’s resort to aggression and other crimes.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy)
“
One way to exert power in restraint of democracy is to bend the state to a market logic, pretending one can replace “citizens” with “customers” (see point 5). Consequently, the neoliberals seek to restructure the state with numerous audit devices (under the sign of “accountability” or the “audit society”) or impose rationalization through introduction of the “new public management”; or, better yet, convert state services to private provision on a contractual basis.
”
”
Philip Mirowski (Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown)
“
Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.
I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors.
”
”
Joan Fontaine (No Bed of Roses: An Autobiography)
“
The men also had more trouble keeping their work secret. It was easier for women, but the men all wanted to brag about going back to the past. Of course, they were forbidden by all sorts of contractual arrangements, but contracts could be forgotten after a few drinks in a bar. That was why Kramer had informed them all about the existence of several specially burned nav wafers. These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living thing for hundreds of miles. Tokyo put you in that city in 1923, just before the earthquake flattened it. The idea was if word of the project became public, you might end up with the wrong wafer on your next trip out. None of the military types were quite sure whether any of this was true, or just company mythology. Which was just how Kramer liked it.
”
”
Michael Crichton (Timeline)
“
He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.
”
”
Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
“
The legal structure of Islamic marriage is predicated on a gender-differentiated allocation of interdependent claims, which would be thrown into chaos by a same-sex union. In the standard contractual understanding of marriage, the husband holds milk al-nikah, control of the marriage tie, and the wife has a claim to dower and the obligation of sexual exclusivity and availability. Several early jurists considered the possibility of whether these rights and duties could be reallocated – whether a woman could pay a man a dower, for example, and retain control over sex and divorce – and agreed unanimously that such a reallocation is not permitted. Not only are husbands’ and wives’ rights distinct, but each role is fundamentally linked to the sex/gender of the person exercising it. A woman cannot wield control of the marriage tie; a man cannot be contractually bound to sexual availability to his wife. Thus, following that logic, it would not be possible for one woman to adopt the “husband” role and the other to adopt the “wife” role in the marriage of two women. The self-contained logic of the jurisprudential framework does not permit such an outcome.
”
”
Kecia Ali (Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence)
“
To be a serious fan is to be in a relationship with distance. Just like the act of waiting, engaging with distance is a Sisyphean task. Each act of fandom is an attempt to bridge some gap, to obliterate or quietly dissolve the space with wanting, caring, knowing. Sometimes we’re content with distance, there’s a respect for it and the contractual understanding between us and our object that’s borne from it. Sometimes we might resent it, but we can’t forget it: that’s the deal. The type of closeness and distance we have depends on the artist we choose–or are compelled–to follow.
”
”
Hannah Ewens (Fangirls)
“
The practice of “tolerance,” in the sense of allowing people to dissent, did not of course exist in any part of Christian Europe in the 1500s. It came into being only centuries later, when some states conceded legal rights to religious minorities. But frontier societies having contact with other cultures, as in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe, were in a special category. Spain, like them, was a plural (and therefore in some sense forbearing) society long before toleration became a philosophical issue. The same was true of Transylvania and Poland. “There is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland,” a Polish Lutheran stated in 1592. “In addition to the Greek Christians among us, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time, and faiths other than Roman Catholic have existed for centuries.”46 It was therefore commonplace, within that plural context, to have toleration without a theory of toleration, because there were legal guarantees for each faith.47 The protection given to the aljamas by Christian lords was by nature contractual: in return for protection, the Muslims and Jews paid taxes. Because there was no unitary political authority in Spain, the nobles felt free to allow their Muslims to observe their own cultural customs long after the Spanish crown had officially abolished the legal existence of Islam (in 1500 in Castile, in 1526 in the crown of Aragon). The development can be seen as inherent in the nature of pre-modern political systems in Europe. Before the advent of the modern (“nation”) state, small autonomous cultural groups could exist without being subjected to persecution, thanks to the protection of local authorities. The coming of the centralizing state, in post-Reformation Europe, removed that protection and aggravated intolerance.
”
”
Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision)
“
This does not mean that the state necessarily creates money. Money is credit, it can be brought into being by private contractual agreements (loans, for instance). The state merely enforces the agreement and dictates the legal terms. Hence Keynes’ next dramatic assertion: that banks create money, and that there is no intrinsic limit to their ability to do so: since however much they lend, the borrower will have no choice but to put the money back into some bank again, and thus, from the perspective of the banking system as a whole, the total number of debits and credits will always cancel out.29 The implications were radical, but Keynes himself was not. In the end, he was always careful to frame the problem in a way that could be reintegrated into the mainstream economics of his day.
”
”
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
“
Furthermore, the social contract makes sense only if future generations are included in it. The purpose is to establish an enduring society. At once, therefore, there arises that web of non-contractual obligations that links parents to children and children to parents and that ensures, willy-nilly, that within a generation the society will be encumbered by non-voting members, dead and unborn, who will rely on something other than a mere contract between the living if their rights are to be respected and their love deserved. Even when there arises, as in America, an idea of ‘elective nationality’, so that newcomers may choose to belong, what is chosen is precisely not a contract but a bond of membership, whose obligations and privileges transcend anything that could be contained in a defeasible agreement.
”
”
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
“
Megan resumes darting her eyes back and forth between me and my sperm donor.
“So,” she says after several seconds pass in silence. “Is someone going to fill me in?”
“There’s nothing to fill,” I say, then blush because I’m a bad liar and because Chase has been filling me quite well.
Apparently, he’s also turned me into a pervert.
Megan narrows her eyes. “Are the two of you…?”
“No!” Chase and I say at once. Like that’s not obvious.
“I’m helping Pop with his computer,” I say in a rush, eager to make this situation seem anything other than what it is. Though, at this point, I’m not sure what it is. This morning’s activities have had nothing at all to do with our contractual agreement.
“Ah. I see.” Megan doesn’t seem convinced, but she turns to her grandfather anyway, and says, “I told you Phil would help you with that, Pop.”
“She’s nicer than Phil,” Pop says, nodding in my direction. “She’s prettier than him, too.” He winks as though he knows he’s part of a cover-up.
And because I’ve completely fallen for this old man, I wink back.
”
”
Laurelin Paige (Hot Cop)
“
There are no standards in this process because it’s a contractual obligation. All I care about is finding someone who’s practical, fertile, and has a face considered proportionate enough to be deemed attractive.” Cal grins. “With that kind of charm, I bet you’ll be walking down the aisle in no time.” Declan shoots a withering glare into the camera. “Will I be your best man? Before you decide, think about it. Rowan wouldn’t know the first thing about planning a bachelor party. He considers puffing cigars at your house a good time.” “That’s because it is a good time.” “Think about it. I’m talking Vegas. Buffets. Strip clubs. Casinos.” Cal ticks off each on his fingers. “If you’re trying to sell me on this, you lost me at Vegas.” I laugh. “Declan’s happy place happens to be the four walls of his home.” Cal rubs his stubbled chin. “Okay. I’ll compromise and bring Vegas to you.” “Neither of you will be my best man because I’m eloping.” Cal scoffs. “You and Rowan are so boring it’s no wonder you get along so well. Only you would skip out on a massive party to elope.
”
”
Lauren Asher (The Fine Print (Dreamland Billionaires, #1))
“
They [anarchists and radical environmentalists] point out that the state and its philosophers, having retrospectively sold us a social contract we never saw nor signed, seem anyway to have reneged on their side of the bargain which was to protect our lives and liberties. The new institutionally guaranteed ‘freedoms’, to democracy, free speech, individual liberty, so dearly brought, constantly fail to live up to expectation. What does it mean to have political freedom when the parties on offer are ideologically identical clones? What kind of intellectual freedom is it that brands all those who dare to think differently dangerous extremists? What kind of individuality expects us all to conform within such narrow limits? What freedoms are even possible when the very air we breathe is poisoned and the food we eat contaminated with the so-called ‘by-products’ of progress? In such circumstances, it is surely not surprising that some might choose the dream of pre-contractual state of natural innocence to the increasingly nightmarish ‘reality’ of Locke’s post-contractual culture.
”
”
Mick Smith
“
The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.
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Sylvia Browne (End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World)
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On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.
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Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
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Mis ambiciones respecto al libro quedarán completamente realizadas si permite ver más claramente los principales rasgos estructurales de la otra concepción de la justicia que está implícita en la tradición contractual, señalando el camino de su ulterior elaboración. Creo que, de las ideas tradicionales, es esta concepción la que más se aproxima a nuestros juicios meditados acerca de la justicia y la que constituye la base moral más apropiada para una sociedad democrática.
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John Rawls (Teoría de la justicia (Spanish Edition))
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why contractual incompleteness matters. The reason is that the renegotiation process imposes several costs. Some of these are ex post costs, incurred at the renegotiation stage itself, and others are ex ante costs, incurred in anticipation of renegotiation.
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Oliver Hart (Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure (Clarendon Lectures in Economics))
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Faced with this abuse of power - by the strong against the weak - by the use of the small print of the conditions - the judges did what they could to put a curb upon it. They still had before them the idol, "freedom of contract." They still knelt down and worshipped it, but they concealed under their cloaks a secret weapon. They used it to stab the idol in the back. This weapon was called "the true construction of the contract." They used it with great skill and ingenuity. They used it so as to depart from the natural meaning of the words of the exemption clause and to put upon them a strained and unnatural construction. In case after case, they said that the words were not strong enough to give the big concern exemption from liability; or that in the circumstances the big concern was not entitled to rely on the exemption clause. If a ship deviated from the contractual voyage, the owner could not rely on the exemption clause. If a warehouseman stored the goods in the wrong warehouse, he could not pray in aid the limitation clause. If the seller supplied goods different in kind from those contracted for, he could not rely on any exemption from liability. If a shipowner delivered goods to a person without production of the bill of lading, he could not escape responsibility by reference to an exemption clause. In short, whenever the wide words - in their natural meaning - would give rise to an unreasonable result, the judges either rejected them as repugnant to the main purpose of the contract, or else cut them down to size in order to produce a reasonable result.
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Tom Denning
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Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.
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Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
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The iPhone’s app store introduced business development on steroids. Nokia, BlackBerry, and traditional carriers sourced their apps contractually, whereas the iPhone created an open platform, allowing anyone to create apps for
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Sangeet Paul Choudary (Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment)
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Our relationship with God is not contractual, so that we could fulfill the right conditions and it would have the desired results, as if our relationship with God resembled putting coins in a vending machine. It is a personal relationship, and such relationships involve freedom on both sides. Joel
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John E. Goldingay (Do We Need the New Testament?: Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself)
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Specifically, he should: Initiate at least six hugs per day, holding each for at least six seconds.* Stop what he’s doing and greet you whenever you come into the house. Tell you how he’s trying to feel connected to you when you’re apart. Keep his contractual agreement to make a daily gesture (something small and brief) to let you know that you are important to him.
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Steven Stosny (You Don't Have to Take it Anymore: Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One (A Powerful Guide for Women))
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Physical Invasion
The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se.
If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles.
Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence?
Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him.
"Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it.
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Murray N. Rothbard (Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution)
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If one sexual partner is economically dependent on the other, then the question of sexual coercion, of contractual obligation, raises its ugly head in the very abode of love and inevitably colours the nature of the sexual expression of affection. The marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contract. Prostitutes are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability, but their services are suffering a decline in demand now that other women have invaded their territory in their own search for a newly acknowledged sexual pleasure. In this period, promiscuous abandon may seem the only type of free exchange.
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Angela Carter (The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (Virago Modern Classics Book 79))
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Crucially, most of the existing Harrah’s debt did not have to be refinanced. Because it was not secured by any collateral, suddenly Harrah’s could issue senior debt backed by the company’s assets. It would do so in the LBO deal, pushing $4.5 billion of existing debt to the bottom of the totem pole in a $25 billion debt stack. This was cruel. Those existing unsecured bonds crashed in price as they were last in line to be repaid. But the maneuver allowed Apollo and TPG to issue new debt more cheaply. And it illustrated one of the key legal principles that would echo through this case: Debtholders’ relationship with the company remains strictly contractual. Any rights they have must be bargained for and embedded in documents. The management and board of a company, in contrast, have fiduciary duties which dictate that they maximize shareholder value.
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Sujeet Indap (The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street)
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This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together.
In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process.
The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage.
Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before.
Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic.
You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.
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Tomislav Milinović
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Adjusting supply up and down contractually defines a bonding curve: the price relationship between the token supply and a corresponding asset used to purchase the tokens. In most implementations, investors sell back to the curve using the same price relationship.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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Employees suggest that workers are at the behest of the employer, employed as factors of production on a contractual basis. Colleagues are partners in the enterprise, contributing to its growth and sharing in its success.
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Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
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We aren’t contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause!
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Alan Moore (Absolute Batman: The Killing Joke)
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We couldn’t figure out why a news organization, which reported contractually protected information routinely in national security and business contexts, would suddenly be so concerned about upholding settlements related to sexual harassment.
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Ronan Farrow (Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)
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He’s apparently forgotten what he did—shoving his dick into her sister’s pussy. But then, he has the brain of an amoeba. An amoeba with amnesia.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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No fiancée of mine will put up with bullshit,
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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My fiancée said you were doing us a favor.” Why did he put that strong emphasis on “my fiancée”?
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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You can call her Lucie all you want, but at the end of the day, she’s my fiancée, soon to be my wife.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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I want her to suffer, but at the same time, I want to shield her.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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I take my wedding vows seriously. And I won’t be going to other women when I can have you.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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I look down at the woman in my arms—my wife. The need to coddle her and the need to even our scales wage a battle.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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Nobody talks to my wife with disrespect.
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Nadia Lee (Contractually Yours (The Lasker Brothers, #4))
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Injustice becomes a matter of uncertainty, justice a matter of contractual predictability. Redistribution plays a minor part in his social philosophy, and then only as part of the machinery of macroeconomic stabilization, not as a means to an ideal goal such as equality.
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Robert Skidelsky (Keynes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction… now that they are available these computers have several other uses.”8 He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.
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Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)
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You said we’re not kids fumbling around in the back of a wagon, and you’re right. We’re in charge of our own gods-damned lives no matter how hard we’ve been kicked around. We can set the clock back however many years we like. It’s ours to set!” “This is crazy.” “No. Two weeks ago I was begging to die. That’s crazy. Two weeks ago I came this close, this close.” He held up a thumb and forefinger with no space at all between them. “I hit the black wall between this life and the next, believe me. I am through fucking around. Maybe this is going to complicate the hell out of things. So what? You’re the complication I want more than anything else. You’re my favorite complication. No matter what sort of holes you poke in my trust.” “You know, self-pity is the only thing that smells worse than four days of road sweat.” “Self-pity is about the only straw left to cling to after YOU happen to a fellow,” said Locke. “We can have this if we both want it. But you have to want it, too. This isn’t me trying to convince you of anything, unless …” “Unless?” “Unless some part of you is already convinced.” “Dinner,” she said softly. “And a contractual option for … subsequent complications. At your discretion.
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Scott Lynch (The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard, #3))
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Though illustrating a Wings LP, Arrowsmith’s cover shot also symbolized Paul’s feeling of contractual imprisonment with Apple. The seed of an idea sown by George at their July business meeting had now been captured in both song and photograph, and a veiled illustration of Paul’s desire to finally shed his legal ties with John, George, and Ringo would soon be in the hands of music fans.
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Allan Kozinn (The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73)
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Reasonable skill and care is a contractual duty analogous to ‘reasonably competent’. Its evil twin is fit for purpose, a term which, when used in a contract, prevents the use of all the defences implicit in those terms containing the word reasonable. We might therefore consider it to require us to be unreasonably competent, and to exercise unreasonable skill and care. Which hardly seems reasonable.
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Sean Moran
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Paul Ricœur has two terms that neatly sum up this difference between modern contracts and God’s covenants.12 Contracts obey a logic of equivalence, a regime of strict justice in which unerring calculation determines the just measure of commitment in each case. It is the logic of the transaction and of the market, a reciprocal paradigm in which debts must be paid in full, but no more. The logic of equivalence belongs to a view of the world in which every gift is a trojan horse that requires reciprocation sooner or later: “They invited us round for dinner and baked their own dessert; we will have to do the same!” It is the ethics of a Derrida who ruefully acknowledges that “for there to be gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt.”13 This is an impossible standard that leads him to conclude that the pure gift is impossible and could not even be recognized as such: gifts always fall back into economies of debt sooner or later, a grim reality that leads Terry Eagleton to remark “one would not have wished to spend Christmas in the Derrida household.”14 The contractual logic of equivalence is the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a human logic. God’s covenants, by contrast, operate according to a logic of superabundance, a lavish, gracious, loving paradigm of excess. God walks between the animal parts alone; the exodus rescue precedes the Sinai law; Christ lays down his life in the new covenant in his blood. This is the logic of the “how much more” of the Pauline epistles (Rom 5:9, 10, 15, 17; 11:24; 1 Cor 6:3; 2 Cor 3:9) and the letter to the Hebrews (Heb 9:14; 10:29; 12:9), of going beyond the call of duty, beyond what is right and proper, beyond what could reasonably be demanded on a ledger of credit and debt. The logic of superabundance replaces the fear and submission of Hobbes’s Leviathan or the tyranny of Rousseau’s general will with the love and sacrifice of Christ. It is the logic of grace and the gift. It is a divine logic. The
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Christopher Watkin (Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture)
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Medieval European urban communities were increasingly built around a new kind of impersonal commerce and trade, centered in part on contractual exchanges.
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Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
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El historiador económico David Landes ha elaborado recientemente una lista de medidas que el gobierno ideal tendría que adoptar para el crecimiento y desarrollo: 1. aseguraría los derechos de la propiedad privada del mejor modo posible para alentar el ahorro y la inversión; 2. aseguraría los derechos de libertad individual… tanto contra los abusos de la tiranía como… del crimen y la corrupción; 3. haría cumplir el derecho contractual… 4. proporcionaría un gobierno estable… guiado por normas de dominio público; 5. proporcionaría un gobierno receptivo; 6. proporcionaría un gobierno honrado… [no] hipotecado a los favores y a la posición; 7. proporcionaría un gobierno moderado, eficiente, poco ambicioso… que rebajara los impuestos [y] redujera lo asignado al gobierno en el excedente social.
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Niall Ferguson (El imperio británico)
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It should be no surprise to anyone that those airline employees who contractually receive above-market salaries will resist any reduction in these as long as their checks continue to clear
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Mark Gavagan (Gems from Warren Buffett: Wit and Wisdom from 34 Years of Letters to Shareholders)
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Moreover, the attempt by advocates of same-sex marriage to sever marriage from procreation is more chimerical than real.35 One would be hard-pressed to find an advocate of same-sex marriage who would accept the proposition that same-sex couples should be given the right to marry but that right does not entail a right to procreate and rear children. Were marriage and family truly severable, as the contractual view suggests, the one would not entail the other. However, advocates of same-sex marriage want it both ways. They want the contractual view of marriage plus the option of raising children.
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Jean Bethke Elshtain (The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, & Morals)
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The analogy between infertile heterosexuals and same-sex couples misses the point. The extension of marriage to infertile heterosexual couples serves not to deprecate same-sex couples, but to preserve the equal status of women in marriage. A test for fertility would be unfair to women because all women spend most of their adult lives in a state of infertility. Fertile women are infertile most days of a month, and postmenopausal women are always infertile. A fertility requirement would also render women susceptible to enormous abuse by men, providing a ready excuse for men who would trade in older women for nubile brides. The status of women in marriage would be intolerably diminished through this practice. Infertility is less common among men, as they can sire children into old age. Moreover, men, like women, typically do not discover that they are infertile until they attempt to sire children, at which time they ought already to be married. A measure that serves primarily to protect women and to preserve their equal status within the institution of marriage is not a measure that is an appropriate basis by which to judge that the same should go for same-sex couples. One of the great challenges men and women face in marriage is in coming to terms with their differences while respecting the status of the other as an equal. Acceptance of infertility is a measure promoting this end. A measure to accommodate the reality of sex-based difference in marriage is no reason to extend marriage to same-sex couples. Moreover, accommodation for infertility in no way diminishes the reality that the inequality of the parent-child relationship is what differentiates marriage from other contractual relationships. It is the parent-child relation, as it emerges from sexual difference and procreation, which elevates marriage above a mere contract, and renders it a sacred duty.
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Jean Bethke Elshtain (The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, & Morals)
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Papers are organized into only three categories: needs attention, should be saved (contractual documents), and should be saved (others). The point is to keep all papers in one category in the same container or folder and to purposely refrain from subdividing them any further by content. In other words, you only need three containers or folders. Don’t forget that the “needs attention” box ought to be empty. If there are papers in it, be aware that this means you have left things undone in your life that require your attention. Although I have never managed to completely empty my “needs attention” box, this is the goal to which we should aspire.
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Marie Kondō (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1))
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Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training.
Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday.
Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years.
Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries.
Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries.
According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020.
Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year.
Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.
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Jackie Legaspi
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The cost estimate of the prospectus turned out to be a best possible outcome based on the unlikely assumption that everything would go according to plan with no delays, no changes in performance specifications, no management problems, no problems with contractual arrangements or new technologies or geology, no major conflicts, no political promises not kept, and so on.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition)
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smart contract is a proposed tool to automate human interactions: it is a computer protocol – an algorithm – that can self-execute, self-enforce, self-verify, and self-constrain the performance of a contract.[30][31][32] Whereas Bitcoin and its direct progeny are referred to as the “1.0” generation, as shown below, contracts, on “2.0” platforms – the next generation of cryptocurrency, are able to enforce themselves.[33] They do not have a physical enforcement arm the way legal contracts do.[34] Rather, because they embody complex contractual relationships in computational material, they move certain defined asset(s) automatically under certain conditions.
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Tim Swanson (Great Chain of Numbers: A Guide to Smart Contracts, Smart Property and Trustless Asset Management)
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Remember, marriage is not a contractual arrangement. True love doesn’t say, “Make me feel this way if you want me to stay.” That’s not love. Instead, true love says in commitment, “I’m giving myself to you regardless.
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Matt Chandler (The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption)
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Capitalism is an economic system based on free trade or market competition involving individual ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages individual and business ventures, contrasted with a state or government controlled economy and trade deals, falsely so-called called free trade. The individual is the center of capitalist enterprise. The genius of capitalism and true free trade is that it allows individuals to come together and engage in commerce of goods and services without government interference or control. In true free trade, the government is nowhere to be seen. Third parties can mediate contractual agreements or disputes.
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Jack Kettler (The Religion That Started in a Hat: A Reference Manual for Christians Who Witness to Mormons)
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Alien enemies are those who are subjects of different sovereignties which are at war with each other. In some cases, war simply suspends the contractual powers of aliens and does not terminate them. But in no case will communications or transfers of property or money across the line of hostilities be permitted.^
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James Matlock Ogden (The law of negotiable instruments, including promissory notes, bills of exchange, bank checks and other commercial paper, with...)
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Igualmente se denota que, como acertadamente indica el Procurador General de la Nación en su concepto, la norma no impide la celebración de otros negocios jurídicos distintos al contrato de transporte, como el leasign (arrendamiento financiero) o el renting (arrendamiento operativo), donde el objeto contractual es distinto al contrato de transporte (movilizar personas o cosas de un lugar a otro a cambio de una contraprestación, generalmente pecuniaria), al punto que incluso una empresa de transporte puede acudir a las dos primeras figuras contractuales para acrecentar su capacidad operativa, claro está, siempre que dichos equipos estén matriculados para prestar tal servicio y cumplan las condiciones técnicas para ello
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Anonymous
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The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down. The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit.28
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Philip Clayton (Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe (Toward Ecological Civilization))
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You know what I’ll say to the first person in our company who comes to us with a proposal to invest a billion dollars in Iraq?” asked the CEO of one of the supermajors a month before the war. “I’ll say, ‘Tell us about the legal system, tell us about the political system. Tell us about the economic system and about the contractual and fiscal systems, and tell us about arbitration. And tell us about security, and tell us about the evolution of the political system. Tell us all those things, and then we’ll talk about whether we’re going to invest or not.’”9
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Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World)
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With a typical contract, one party decides what should be done and hands over the design to another party to implement and often to a third party to deploy and support. Although it may be unavoidable, such a contractual approach is far from ideal; it increases costs and decreases flexibility.
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Mary Poppendieck (Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point)
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We always stand to gain, whether it be an influential politician to further our interests — which is the most frequent and almost easiest case to fabricate — or a great businessman, most of whose money we administer through our own networks. It is therefore our interest to create as many such ‘vicious circles’ as possible. And it is on this foundation that we have built modern society and the so-called ‘cell of society,’ that is, the family which we have chained to an infinite set of dependences: jobs, houses, comfort, cars, bank loans, and long-term contractual obligations that sometimes extend over one or two generations of the respective family. The role of a ‘vicious circle’ is to make people dependent because, when this happens, they are no longer free.
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Radu Cinamar (Transylvanian Sunrise)
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Agreements, through their sheer clarity, thoroughness, and collaborative tone, can go a long way in preventing conflict. At the same time, not everything can and should be set in contractual stone. Sometimes, rather than making an agreement on how to handle an issue, our clients may simply want to make an “agreement to agree”—to say that if an issue arises, they will sit down and come up with a reasonable solution.
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Janelle Orsi (Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies)
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But what should I care about? That is the question. In order to clarify, circumscribe, and bring order to the scope of my contractual liabilities and responsibilities, I’m drafting (in addition to the rubber stamp disclaimers) what will be, I like to think, the ultimate e-mail disclaimer. One happy day, it will automatically appear in bold print at the foot of my messages and trounce the fuckers once and for all.
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Joseph O'Neill (The Dog)
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But to interpret the Islamic waqf as an ‘act’ of citizenship is at best unconventional. This argument requires changing our modern understanding of citizenship as contractual status. It requires considering the ways in which the concept of citizenship has evolved through history and how it enabled a division between modern and traditional and occidental and oriental.2 Once we fulfill these requirements, new avenues of thought open up through which we can interpret Islamic waqfs as acts of citizenship.
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Pascale Gazaleh (Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World)
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David Landes sintetizó esta perspectiva postulando que el gobierno ideal para el crecimiento y desarrollo 1. aseguraría los derechos de la propiedad privada del mejor modo posible para alentar el ahorro y la inversión; 2. aseguraría los derechos de libertad individual […] tanto contra los abusos de la tiranía como […] del crimen y la corrupción; 3. haría cumplir el derecho contractual […]; 4. proporcionaría un gobierno estable […] gobernado por reglas de dominio público […]; 5. proporcionaría un gobierno receptivo […]; 6. proporcionaría un gobierno honrado […] no hipotecado al favor y a la posición; 7. proporcionaría un gobierno moderado, eficiente, poco voraz […] que rebajara los impuestos [y] redujera la cuota del gobierno en el excedente social […].30
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Niall Ferguson (Coloso)
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Step By Step Guide To Finding A Good Roofing Contractor
The local roofing repair contractor you choose should always have a great reputation in the community and a track record of exceptional customer service. When you can't be on site, you need to know that your service provider is doing an excellent job. You also need to be sure that old-fashioned craftsmanship and quality materials are part of the roofing repair contractor's vision for his work. The following are methods to make sure that you hire the right roofing repair contractor.
A reliable roofing repair contractor will make an effort to bring you the highest quality results. Well-regarded roofing repair contractors preserve their good reputations by always keeping their promises. Give your roofing repair contractor an appropriate timeline and do not interrupt his work unnecessarily. Discover how the contractual worker arrangements to handle any obligation issues.
Once you start seeing bids, do not make the mistake of assuming that a low bid will lead to a similarly low work performance. Check the cost of the needed materials and compare them to the pricing of the low bid. In addition, it's important to think about all the labor costs. Construct a legal contract only when you have determined the price is within reason.
Often when you are searching for a local roofing repair contractor with a great reputation and who will provide the very best work, this is usually one of the busier people in his field. If your local roofing repair contractor has a reputation for doing a great job, be prepared to wait to engage his services. There is a downside to roofing repair contractors who are in high demand as they might not be able to focus entirely on your project. The most vital thing in finding a local roofing repair contractor is to trust your instincts.
Every time a roofing expert comes to you with a legal contract that requires your signature, read the legal agreement to really ensure all of your requests are present in the legal agreement and the roofing expert recognizes them. If you're taking the time to ensure the legal agreement has everything you and your service provider had agreed on and is put in clear terms, it'll save you much stress and money down the road. Ensure you have posed all questions and concerns to your service provider prior to signing an agreement. If there are any terms or conditions you do not understand, give the legal agreement to a lawyer for clarification.
Roofing contractors with excellent reputations consider it good business practice to provide each client with a written quote before starting work on any job. If the info is needed, pronto, your roofing repair contractor might be willing to provide you with a quote over the phone. Inspect the schedule and qualifications of the roofing repair contractor to effectively ensure that the project will be finished exactly how and when you would like it and within your financial requirements. Make sure to ask any questions and address all concerns to your satisfaction before you employee a roofing repair contractor
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Anchor Roofing, Inc.
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What I do not believe in, are incentives handed over as a kind of sop (you will find these everywhere) or in an owner sharing the proceeds of an asset sale unless contractually bound to do so. Use
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Felix Dennis (How to Get Rich)
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but I would have rights to franchise copies of their operations everywhere else in the United States. The buildings would have to be exactly like the new one their architect had drawn up with the golden arches. The name, McDonald’s, would be on all of them, of course, and I was one hundred percent in favor of that. I had a feeling that it would be one of those promotable names that would catch the public fancy. I was for the contractual clauses that obligated me to follow their plans down to the last detail, too—even to signs and menus. But I should have been more cautious there. The agreement was that I could not deviate from their plans in my units unless the changes were spelled out in writing, signed by both brothers, and sent to me by registered mail. This seemingly innocuous requirement created massive problems for me.
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Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)