Cost Reduction Quotes

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All revenue is not the same. If you remove your worst, unprofitable clients and the now-unnecessary costs associated with them, you will see a jump in profitability and a reduction in stress, often within a few weeks. Equally important, you will have more time to pursue and clone your best clients.
Mike Michalowicz (Profit First: A Simple System To Transform Any Business From A Cash-Eating Monster To A Money-Making Machine)
cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability,
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth))
Companies should understand their cost structure to make informed decisions, optimize operations, and enhance profitability. This knowledge enables them to identify areas for cost reduction, pricing strategies, and resource allocation, ultimately contributing to financial sustainability and competitiveness.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Companies should seek opportunities for cost reduction to improve efficiency, increase profitability, and maintain a competitive edge. Cost reduction efforts can lead to better financial health, enhanced competitiveness, and the ability to allocate resources to other critical areas of the business, fostering long-term growth and sustainability.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Whatever the tax rate is, pay it. The cost of non-compliance is greater than the cost of reduction of profits.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Only the Gemba Can Do Cost Reduction
Taiichi Ohno (Taiichi Ohnos Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition)
According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
Significance unfortunately is a useful means toward a personal ends in the advance of science - status and widely distributed publications, a big laboratory, a staff of research assistants, a reduction in teaching load, a better salary, the finer wines of Bordeaux. Precision, knowledge, and control. In a narrow and cynical sense statistical significance is the way to achieve these. Design experiment. Then calculate statistical significance. Publish articles showing "significant" results. Enjoy promotion. But it is not science, and it will not last.
Stephen Thomas Ziliak (The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (Economics, Cognition, And Society))
Especially since it was rumored that soon we would all be working side by side at long tables so we could collaborate—or however the university would fictionalize the latest cost-reduction initiative.
Camille Pagán (I'm Fine and Neither Are You)
challenging market, when so many of our customers are struggling to control costs, our engineers have been reconfiguring our portfolio into industry-leading suites of cost-reduction technologies and services.
Jeff Thull (Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High!)
the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues?
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
We shall then have a situation in which the cost of living has risen by an average of 25 percent. The farm hands, though they have had no reduction in their money wages, will be considerably worse off in terms of what they can buy. The retail store workers, even though they have got an increase in money wages of 10 percent, will be worse off than before the race began. Even the workers in the clothing trades, with a money-wage increase of 20 percent, will be at a disadvantage compared with their previous position. The coal miners, with a money-wage increase of 30 percent, will have made in purchasing power only a slight gain. The building and railroad workers will of course have made a gain, but one much smaller in actuality than in appearance.
Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics)
The organic and inorganic structures supporting human life are changing. Breathtaking technological developments, coupled with rapid advances in medicine, supported a dramatic explosion in the human population worldwide. Increases in human population placed pressure upon the habitat. Lack of foresight and commercial ogres fused to a consumptive consumer mentality fostered a radical reduction in habitat for other creatures and spawned a predictable environmental crisis. Commercial enterprises nimbly renamed the “environmental crisis” the “energy crisis,” effectively downplaying the dramatic cost inflicted upon the ecosystem in the name of preserving cheap energy sources for Americans. We live on the brink of impending disaster. Nonetheless, we must carry on. It is humankind’s greatest challenge to place our self-gratification in check in order to ensure that our species and other creatures survive the violent onslaught raging against the ecosystem. Despite the rapid expansion of new technology, which alters how human beings live and communicate with each other, the fundamental challenge of humanity remains consistent. Every generation must address how to live a purposeful life, one filled with joy and contentment.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
difference, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. In a competitive market economy it is the high-cost producers, the inefficient producers, that are driven out by a fall in price. In the case of an agricultural commodity it is the least competent farmers, or those with the poorest equipment, or those working the poorest land, that are driven out. The most capable farmers on the best land do not have to restrict their production. On the contrary, if the fall in price has been symptomatic of a lower average cost of production, reflected through an increased supply, then the driving out of the marginal farmers on the marginal land enables the good farmers on the good land to expand their production. So there may be, in the long run, no reduction whatever in the output of that commodity. And the product is then produced and sold at a permanently lower price. If
Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics)
It is true that neural tissue imposes significant metabolic demands on organisms that natural selection will tend to shed if doing so is beneficial. It is also true that brain size has been reduced in many animal lineages for whom the metabolic costs of cognitive substrate outweigh the benefits of enhanced cognition. This is poignantly illustrated by secondarily herbivorous vertebrates (like panda's) whose calorie-frugal diet can no longer sustain their carnivorous clade's historical brain tissue expenditures. It is the case as well for lineages whose ecology calls for the reduction of neurologically demanding somato-sensory functions, such as 'cavefish' - several groups of freshwater fish adapted to lightless underground habitats that have repeatedly lost portions of the cortex dedicated to visual processing. The loss of a complex head is thus not totally inconceivable.
Russell Powell (Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind)
I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? —
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.
Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle-and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle-and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latina/ os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/ o racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas: all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
In the present time, Information Technology has emerged as one of the most promising Industries across the globe. Globally for the reduction of cost, time and efforts involved in the production and supply of the goods and services has made whole business world to adopt the technological support. And due to this reason only Software development have emerged as a important means of growth of IT Industry in India. Software Development Companies in India Have played a crucial role in rapid development of Software industry in India. These Companies Constantly improve and enhance the world of computers and technology. With the help of Software development all the complicated machines whether its computers, laptops, mobile phones or navigation devices all these machines are the way they are today performing various tasks successfully. As Software Development is having a essential role in many industries, so organizations have realized their importance for improving themselves in various aspects of management. Software Development have increased the productivity of the businesses by reducing the human efforts and errors. This increased demand in the Software Development have also given rise to high demand of Software Development Companies everywhere. Even there is a huge demand of best Software Company in Lucknow as Lucknow being capital of U.P have become a growing market for various industries and now almost every offline brand has setup into online businesses of their products and services. As the number of internet users are increasing day by day so are the businesses entering into the online so that they could influence customers online. Besides Software Development many other web solutions like web hosting, web development and website designing services have great demand in the market also therefore, Software Companies have started offering all these services along with software development. Software Industry is flooded with various software companies which are also Website Development Company in Lucknow offering various web based services but it is required by you to choose wisely which company to choose to help your business sustain successfully in long run and stay ahead of its competitors in the market. The company is choosen such that which provide good quality software’s in affordable price.
webdigitronix
It's already happening. After falling for years, California's greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.7 percent in 2012, pushed up by the drought and the closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Diego County. The state has not yet released emissions data for 2013. Experts say a sustained drought wouldn't prevent California from reaching its climate change goals. Instead, years of dry weather would force energy providers to find new strategies - ones that would likely cost more. In addition to being clean, hydropower tends to be cheap. "It makes things harder," said Victor Niemeyer, program manager for greenhouse gas reductions at the Electric Power Research Institute. "If there's less hydro, the power has to come from somewhere. You have to burn more gas, and that costs more money, all things considered.
Anonymous
NEW YORK Climate change is likely to exact enormous costs on U.S. regional economies in the form of lost property, reduced industrial output and more deaths, according to a report backed by three men with vast business experience. The report, released Tuesday, is designed to persuade businesses to factor in the cost of climate change in their long-term decisions and to push for reductions in emissions blamed for heating the planet. It was commissioned by the Risky Business Project, which describes itself as nonpartisan and is chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Thomas F. Steyer, a former Bay Area hedge fund manager.
Anonymous
Raising capital. Organisations like Rio Tinto, TomTom and GKN have all raised significant sums through the equity markets. Refinancing debt. Some companies, like Yell and Schaeffler, have rolled over billions in bank finance. However, many businesses are still finding banks reluctant to lend and have turned to bond issuance as an alternative. Divestment. Companies can sell off valuable assets, such as Barclays did with Barclays Global Investors, and it is always better to do so before a crisis; otherwise it will be seen for the fire sale it is and the price will be a fire-sale price. Furthermore, any sell-off that weakens a firm’s core capability or its long-term competitive position may also shorten its life. Cut costs but not capability The managing uncertainty survey revealed that the most common action that companies took when the financial crisis struck was to cut costs. Some 82% of respondents cut costs. When asked about their future responses to uncertainty, 76% indicated they would continue to focus on cost reduction.
Michel Syrett (Managing Uncertainty: Strategies for surviving and thriving in turbulent times)
we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land,
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
Wait a second. Can you fake alarms anywhere else?” Max’s voice burst with pride. “Anywhere on Orron III, Captain. This network’s got so much capacity that they’ve hooked just about everything into it. Good cost reduction, but bad security, right, Captain?” “No foolin’.
Brian Daley (The Han Solo Adventures (Classic Star Wars))
at least 18 other health organizations and the Federal Government supported a reduction in fat and cholesterol,” wrote the editors, with only the academy and the American Medical Association on the other side. The diet’s potential costs—an increased heart disease risk from the carbohydrates, an increased risk of cancer from polyunsaturated oils, or a lack of adequate nutrition for children—were not part of the discussion.
Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet)
To date, there is no strong empirical support for claims that automating medical record keeping will lead to major reductions in health-care costs or significant improvements in the well-being of patients. But if doctors and patients have seen few benefits from the scramble to automate record keeping, the companies that supply the systems have profited. Cerner Corporation, a medical software outfit, saw its revenues triple, from $1 billion to $3 billion, between 2005 and 2013. Cerner, as it happens, was one of five corporations that provided RAND with funding for the original 2005 study. The other sponsors, which included General Electric and Hewlett Packard, also have substantial business interests in health-care automation. As today’s flawed systems are replaced or upgraded in the future, to fix their interoperability problems and other shortcomings, information technology companies will reap further windfalls.
Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us: How Our Computers Are Changing Us)
Each rise in temperature of 1°C results in a 7 percent increase in the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.36 This causes a radical change in the way water is distributed, with more intense precipitation but a reduction in duration and frequency.
Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism)
If the value of the dollar goes down faster than the value of an hour of work, your nominal wages will go up. But that’s still a wage reduction, because this inflation will drive up the price of consumer goods even faster. If your wages rise slower than your cost of living, you’re getting poorer, but you might not notice it as easily, which is good for the politicians.
Peter Schiff (The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country)
Interestingly, the propensity for sharing was more likely outside the United States (especially high in India and Indonesia), was highest among those with higher income, and was increased when associated with potential for research to help others or reduction in their health care costs. Overall,
Eric J. Topol (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands)
Batteries, too, have the potential to change the world—just as much as shale has, should the technology continue to improve. That’s because large-scale batteries, if used to store electricity for the grid, could unlock the potential of renewable power, which has been held back by its intermittent nature. Steve LeVine takes stock of the remarkable cost reductions and technological improvements in battery technology, driven in part by electric-car companies such as Tesla, and envisions what’s next.
Anonymous
Countries competing against one another in the same array of products and services is not covered by Ricardian trade theory.   Offshoring doesn’t fit the Ricardian or the competitive idea of free trade. In fact, offshoring is not trade.   Offshoring is the practice of a firm relocating its production of goods or services for its home market to a foreign country. When an American firm moves production offshore, US GDP declines by the amount of the offshored production, and foreign GDP increases by that amount. Employment and consumer income decline in the US and rise abroad. The US tax base shrinks, resulting in reductions in public services or in higher taxes or a switch from tax finance to bond finance and higher debt service cost.   When the offshored production comes back to the US to be marketed, the US trade deficit increases dollar for dollar. The trade deficit is financed by turning over to foreigners US assets and their future income streams. Profits, dividends, interest, capital gains, rents, and tolls from leased toll roads now flow from American pockets to foreign pockets, thus worsening the current account deficit as well.   Who benefits from these income losses suffered by Americans? Clearly, the beneficiary is the foreign country to which the production is moved. The other prominent beneficiaries are the shareholders and the executives of the companies that offshore production. The lower labor costs raise profits, the share price, and the “performance bonuses” of corporate management.   Offshoring’s proponents claim that the lost incomes from job losses are offset by benefits to consumers from lower prices. Allegedly, the harm done to those who lose their jobs is more than offset by the benefit consumers in general get from the alleged lower prices. Yet, proponents are unable to cite studies that support this claim. The claim is based on the unexamined assumption that offshoring is free trade and, thereby, mutually beneficial.   Proponents of jobs offshoring also claim that the Americans who are left unemployed soon find equal or better jobs. This claim is based on the assumption that the demand for labor ensures full employment, and that people whose jobs have been moved abroad can be retrained for new jobs that are equal to or better than the jobs that were lost.   This claim is false.
Paul Craig Roberts (The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West)
Supplier Consolidation Once the purchasing process has been streamlined, as was described in the preceding sections, the next step is to pursue cost reduction activities. A significant cost reduction technique is to reduce the number of suppliers with which a company does business. By concentrating its orders with a smaller number of suppliers, it can use higher purchasing volume to negotiate price reductions, rebates, and discounts. This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9. The following subtopics address various supplier consolidation issues at a general level. Bottom 10 Percent Besides concentrating order volume, another reason to consolidate suppliers is to eliminate the worst-performing ones. These are the suppliers that deliver the wrong items late and with low quality. Even if these suppliers offer what appear to be rock-bottom prices, the total cost of doing business with them is much higher, because the company is endlessly dealing with receiving inspections, product returns, and the processing of credits. Consequently, having a separate program to identify and eliminate a company’s lowest-rated suppliers can also reduce costs.
Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
If students followed the advice given by those who promote ‘good learner strategies’, such as that learners should persist in attempting to communicate at all costs, they will likely come across as either ‘a pest or a simpleton’. ‘Most learners will probably, in deciding what to say (if anything) have a sort of cut-off point for the reduction [of personality] they will tolerate, below which silence is preferable. Instead of seeing silence as the extreme point on the scale of message reduction, it can also be seen as the alternative to it.
Scott Thornbury (Big Questions in ELT)
There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it’s ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that “NASA has lost its vision.” NASA has lost support, not vision. Wernher
Margaret Lazarus Dean (Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight)
What do citizens expect of government agencies entrusted with crime control, risk control, or other harm reduction duties? The public does not expect that governments will be able to prevent all crimes or contain all harms. But they do expect government agencies to provide the best protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by being:           Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats early, pick up on precursors and warning signs, use their imaginations to work out what could happen, use their intelligence systems to discover what others are planning, and do all this before much harm is done.           Nimble, flexible enough to organize themselves quickly and appropriately around each emerging crime pattern rather than being locked into routines and processes designed for traditional issues.           Skillful, masters of the entire intervention tool kit, experienced (as craftsmen) in picking the best tools for each task, and adept at inventing new approaches when existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 Real success in crime control—spotting emerging crime problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm—would not produce substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures, because genuine and substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown out of control. Neither would best practices produce enormous numbers of arrests, coercive interventions, or any other specific activity, because skill demands economy in the use of force and financial resources and rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather than extensive and costly campaigns. Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics that still seem to wield the most influence in many departments—crime reduction and enforcement productivity—would utterly fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control. Further, we must take seriously the fact that other important duties of the police will never be captured through crime statistics or in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy document:
Malcolm K. Sparrow (Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform)
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DrunkFire
So why don’t the CDC and the AHA admit uncertainty, even at the potential cost of public health? Perhaps because dictating dietary rules, a sacred role that was once the province of priests, contributes to a savior complex. Saviors must remain unwaveringly certain about their mission. They cannot reverse positions, because doing so undermines their authority in the eyes of their followers. And in the case of dietary rules that require substantial willpower to follow—like drastic reductions in sodium—any uncertainty on the part of dieters can lead to failure. Better to conceal scientific ambiguity than to compromise the willpower of your followers.
Alan Levinovitz (The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat)
Engineers knew precisely what each part should look like, and there was a small surprise when the supplier was found to be taking metal out of certain components. One key part that weighed about 48 kilograms was coming in at less than 90 percent of its intended weight. The factory had taken the weight reduction as a cost savings for itself and had passed only the resulting product risk on to Build
Paul Midler (Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game)
In light of all this, it seems fitting that one of God’s great covenants with the Jewish people was a medical procedure that helped combat infection: circumcision (Genesis 17:9–14). In 2012, a task force on circumcision organized by the American Academy of Pediatrics published a review of the costs and benefits of male circumcision. In their estimation the primary benefits are a reduction in urinary tract infections among infants; lower transmission of some STDs, such as HIV and HPV; and fewer cases of penile cancer (often caused by HPV infections). To be sure, circumcision does not appear to reduce transmission of all kinds of STDs; the surgical procedure itself carries a small, non-negligible risk of complications; and some people have raised ethical issues with removing a sensitive part of an infant male’s penis. However, in an era when infectious disease was the number one cause of mortality and incurable STDs could easily cause sterility, male circumcision was probably a wise decision.
John Durant (The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health)
The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.1
Tom DeMarco (Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams)
Corporations have a unique role to play in creating a cleaner environment, and they also have economic incentives to use energy more efficiently as demand and costs rise globally. If every company in the S&P 500 voluntarily reported and disclosed its energy costs, clearly and explicitly as a line item on the balance sheet, there would be pressure to reduce that cost, just as there is for every other expense item. This would result in analyst and investor pressure on corporate executives to be more efficient with their energy output and to source cheaper and alternative sources, which would have a far greater impact on carbon emissions and pollution than any political treaty in history. As an added advantage, reducing costs increases profitability, which provides the appropriate incentives for corporate executives to act in their shareholders’ best interests and effect positive social change. According to PwC, 98 percent of the S&P 500 companies surveyed can link investments in emissions reduction to value creation.55 As a result, these corporations are discovering new ways to enhance efficiencies, create new markets, and build a competitive advantage.
Jeremy Balkin (Investing with Impact: Why Finance Is a Force for Good)
Total Cost Analysis When the purchasing staff considers switching to a new supplier or consolidating its purchases with an existing one, it cannot evaluate the supplier based solely on its quoted price. Instead, it must also consider the total acquisition cost, which can in some cases exceed a product’s initial price. The total acquisition cost includes these items: • Material. The list price of the item being bought, less any rebates or discounts. • Freight. The cost of shipping from the supplier to the company. • Packaging. The company may specify special packaging, such as for quantities that differ from the supplier’s standards and for which the supplier charges an extra fee. • Tooling. If the supplier had to acquire special tooling in order to manufacture parts for the company, such as an injection mold, then it will charge through this cost, either as a lump sum or amortized over some predetermined unit volume. • Setup. If the setup for a production run is unusually lengthy or involves scrap, then the supplier may charge through the cost of the setup. • Warranty. If the product being purchased is to be retained by the company for a lengthy period of time, it may have to buy a warranty extension from the supplier. • Inventory. If there are long delays between when a company orders goods and when it receives them, then it must maintain a safety stock on hand to guard against stock-out conditions and support the cost of funds needed to maintain this stock. • Payment terms. If the supplier insists on rapid payment terms and the company’s own customers have longer payment terms, then the company must support the cost of funds for the period between when it pays the supplier and it is paid by its customers. • Currency used. If supplier payments are to be made in a different currency from the company’s home currency, then it must pay for a foreign exchange transaction and may also need to pay for a hedge, to guard against any unfavorable changes in the exchange rate prior to the scheduled payment date. These costs are only the ones directly associated with a product. In addition, there may be overhead costs related to dealing with a specific supplier (see “Sourcing Distance” later in the chapter), which can be allocated to all products purchased from that supplier.
Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
Adaptation is very effective at cooling cities, (e.g.) cool roofs and pavements… Adaptive actions can typically deliver much more protection much faster and at a lower cost than any realistic carbon-reduction climate policy.
Bjørn Lomborg
Emissions of carbon dioxide are largely by-products of productivity-- of industry, governments, and individuals producing things that we want more of (including heating, cooling, food, transport, hospital care, and so much more)..When countries promise to reduce their emissions, they are effectively promising to make all these things a touch more expensive. That acts as a slight brake on the economy, leading to a small reduction in growth… “This cost is the relevant social cost of climate policies-- the reduction in welfare that comes from each nation insisting on using energy that is slightly more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels.” -p. 112
Bjørn Lomborg
As of July 2017 public spending per capita had fallen by 3.9%.[58] But this figure obscures the the fact that the government is allocating proportionally less of its budget to public services. Per person, day-to-day spending on public services has been cut to about four-fifths of what it was in 2010.[59] Public sector employment was slashed by 15.5% between September 2009 and April 2017, a reduction of nearly one million jobs, primarily affecting women, who make up around two-thirds of the public sector workforce. Overall, £22bn of the £26bn in ‘savings’ since June 2010 have been shouldered by women.[60] Lone mothers (who represent 92% of lone parents) have experienced an average drop in living standards of 18% (£8,790). Black and Asian households in the lowest fifth of incomes are the most affected, with average drops in living standards of 19.2% and 20.1% – £8,407 and £11,678 – respectively.[61] The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said that the cumulative scale of cuts to welfare are “unprecedented”, with real per capita welfare cap spending in 2021-22 projected to be around 10% lower than its 2015-16 level.[62] The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government initially aimed to eliminate the deficit – the difference between annual government income and expenditure – by 2015. But weaker-than-expected economic growth forced the government to push the date back to 2025. The government tried to spin this as a generous easing of austerity, but it was merely giving itself several years longer to take on the deficit. In December 2017 the OBR said that GDP per person would be 3.5% smaller in 2021 than was forecast in March 2016. Contradicting the government, the OBR said the deficit would not be eliminated until 2031. The Institute for Fiscal Studies added that national debt – then standing at £1.94 trillion, with an annual servicing cost of £48bn – may not return to pre-crisis levels until the 2060s. Pressure on the public finances, primarily from health and social care, is only going to increase. In all of the OBR’s scenarios, spending grows faster than the economy. With health costs running ahead of inflation, the National Health Service (NHS) – already suffering from a £4.3bn annual shortfall – requires a 4% minimum annual increase in funding to maintain expenditure per capita amid a growing and ageing population.
Ted Reese (Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown)
I’ve written at length about Trump’s racial history, and the picture is hideously below the mark of what America deserves in a president; he’s an awful, dark stain on our history. What the first term makes abundantly clear is that it’s not an act, it’s not a strategy, and it’s not something the American people can bear. It is exactly who he is: a fucking racist. The referendum on Trump’s racism will play out in 2020, and well beyond, costing the GOP seats, status, and support for generations. They have no one to blame but themselves. IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE Which leads us to what he looks like in a second term. Cognitive decline is an ugly, hard reality for millions of Americans. As the Silent Generation slips into their final years, and the oldest Boomers join them, families all over America confront Alzheimer’s and many other tolls of aging. For many afflicted with a loss of memory and ability, this decline is a sad, steady reduction in the joys of life. For Trump, it’s part of the reality show, though not one he wants to focus on. Comparing Trump now with video clips from a decade ago is chilling. The slippage in his verbal acuity is marked. His rages and explosions of temper aren’t part of an act; they’re no longer controlled or controllable. The nearest contemporary parallel was the second-term decline of Ronald Reagan. Americans sensed the terrible gravity of Alzheimer’s pulling at him, but he was still surrounded by largely competent people and was, on the whole, a healthy man. For all the disagreements Democrats had with him, Reagan could never be considered an impulsive narcissist with a hair-trigger temper and no concern for others. Reagan actually bothered to understand nuclear weapons and the risks they posed, unlike President Missile Parade. Trump’s lack of knowledge should terrify you as much as it does me, especially as his cognitive decline continues apace. Given his hold over the cabinet, there’s no workable solution for this president’s combination of apparent mental infirmities and uncontrolled urges and racist fuckery, suggesting a second term will be more dangerous than the first.
Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)
It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle- and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
CAR-T therapy in a very small subset of cancer patients with lymphoid disease is fantastically successful, albeit causing severe short-term toxicities and many known and unknown lifelong side effects. It is clear that much work lies ahead before this strategy can be scaled up for general use. Yet the hype surrounding CAR-T is such that practically every patient questions me about why they are being deprived of the magic cure. The results are not always magical: Despite high-target, cell-specific killing in vitro and encouraging preclinical efficacies in murine tumor models, clinical responses of adoptively transferred T cells expressing α-folate receptor (FR) specific CAR in ovarian cancer were disappointing. No reduction of tumor burden was seen in the 14 patients studied. The absence of efficacy was ascribed to lack of specific trafficking of the T cells to tumor and short persistence of the transferred T cells.
Azra Raza (The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last)
In the past, school revenue automatically increased when the value of property rose. In 1996 the legislature “floated” the tax, that is, each year they fixed the amount schools would receive and then technicians calculated the rate needed to produce that amount. School property tax eventually fell about one-third as a result. In 2007, a year with record revenue, legislators cut state income taxes and $150–200 million from annual school revenues. None of these measures had a large immediate effect. All were technical, the gradual, long-term reductions were scarcely noticed by the public. By 2006 the Utah Foundation estimated that the changes together cost schools $1.3 billion, one-third of school spending. In 1996, before the changes, Utah had been fifth among the states in percentage of total personal income devoted to public schools. By 2014, Utah had fallen to thirty-seventh.29 After the mid-1990s, Utah’s economy grew more than the American economy, but Utah school spending fell further behind spending in other states. Republican politicians never say they hold down educational spending on purpose. They always say they spend as much as Utah can afford.
Rod Decker (Utah Politics: The Elephant in the Room)
Within the closed walls of civilization a “bad conscience” is not all that ails us, rather as Nietzsche explained, “with the aid of the morality of mores and the social straitjacket, man was actually made calculable.” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals). Fear of the law and punishment were the tools of domestication which weakened our connection to our instincts and made our behavior more predictable, safe, and herd-like: “…the meaning of all culture”, wrote Nietzsche, “is the reduction of the beast of prey “man” to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal.” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals) While this process of domestication was necessary for the creation of civilization, it came at the cost of transforming the human being from a strong, innocent, and free animal into a guilt-ridden, manipulable, and tame creature, dependent on a shepherd to lead him.
Academy of Ideas
The punishment and/or rehabilitation of those who have already been so damaged that they have become violent is also far more expensive and less effective than preventing violence in the first place, and it causes far more suffering, not only to the perpetrators but also to the victims. We spend incomparably more money on police, prisons, punishments and criminal courts than we do on providing the kinds of community services that have been demonstrated to achieve equal reductions in criminal violence for one-fifth of the price. As our prisons have become more and more crowded (and costly), the waiting lists in our substance-abuse treatment centers have become longer and longer — despite the fact that treatment is at least five times more effective than imprisonment, dollar for dollar, in preventing both substance abuse and the property crimes and violence associated with substance abuse.
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
Learn about Public Service Loan Forgiveness The PSLF Program (Public Service Loan Forgiveness) encourages people to proceed and continue their participation in public service careers. In this program, eligible individuals are entitled for forgiveness of their remaining balance that is due on their federal student loans. However, they may only qualify if they were able to make 120 payments on these loans, which are under a particular repayment plan. These individuals also have a full-time employment status from public service companies, so they may qualify for the PSLF. Let’s discuss Public Service Loan Forgiveness with The Student Loan Help Center Team. How to Obtain Remaining Balances on Direct Loans If you want to have remaining balances on your direct loans forgiven through the PSLF, you must be able to make 120 monthly payments on direct loans. Furthermore, these payments should be full and made on time. Another important qualification is securing the payment after October 1, 2007. When you make these monthly payments, keep in mind that you should be a full-time employee at any accredited public service company. Important Details about Eligible Loans for Forgiveness As The Student Loan Help Center CEO Bruce Mesnekoff Said Loans that are eligible for the PSLF program are those you have received from a direct loan. On the other hand, Perkins Loans, Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) and other types of student loans are not valid for PSLF. If you have an existing Perkins loan or FFEL, you have the option to consolidate these into direct consolidation loans, so you may avail of the outstanding benefits offered by the PSLF. Make sure, though, that the payments made on the new loan will be counted toward your payment requirement, which will last for 120 months. Facts about Qualifying Repayment Plans You will be able to maximize your benefits from the PSLF by repaying loans on the IBR (Income Based Repayments) or the ICR (Income Contingent Repayments. These plans enable you to qualify for the PSLF program. The 10-year repayment plan also qualifies you for the PSLF, as well as other plans where the monthly payment you make is equivalent or more than what you are required to pay under the standard 10-year repayment scheme. Before you decide on the best repayment scheme for paying off your direct loans, make sure you are aware of the costs and implications of such decision. When you extend the period in securing your payments for PSLF qualifying payments, you can reduce the remaining balance on your loan when you satisfy all the eligibility requirements for the PSLF program. Moreover, you will have zero balance on loans to be forgiven when you are able to make all 120 monthly payments through the 10 year standard repayment scheme. You can expect a great reduction on your monthly payments under the ICR or IBR plans, as compared to other qualifying repayment options for the PSLF program. Moreover, the repayment term is likely to extend. With a longer period in repaying your loans, you can expect additional interest to accumulate on your loan. Keep in mind, though, that your inability to meet the PSLF requirements will entitle you to pay off the entire loan balance, as well as the accrued interest.
The Student Loan Help Center
Who is responsible for an agency’s operational response to growing workloads and declining fees? In today’s agency culture, it’s everyone… and no one. The agency management culture is fragmented and divided. Everyone does his/her own thing. An integrated counter-attack is hard to organize, and in practice, it simply does not happen. At the end of the year, the finance director has the ultimate responsibility to deliver the agency’s profit margin, and this is often done through cost reductions – a blunt instrument, indeed, but the laissez-faire culture does not allow for much fine-tuning during the year. The agency management culture is a barrier to change. It
Michael Farmer (Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profithungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies)
DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
The rest of the industry appears to have grown sales by 10 percent, with profits growing proportionally. This indicates that the industry-wide profit margin percentages have remained unchanged and that the primary driver of increased profits is sales growth. It also suggests the rest of the industry has not undertaken any major cost-reduction initiatives. If we solve the sales problem for the client, the data suggests that the profit problem will solve itself.
Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
Good neighbors: The successful export-driven development of Taiwan, South Korea, and especially Japan gave Chinese policymakers an easy-to-follow template for industrial development. •  Hong Kong: When China started its reforms, Hong Kong was already a world-class port and trading hub with modern legal and financial systems. This gave Chinese manufacturers quick access not only to global trade routes but also to much of the “soft” infrastructure needed for a modern economy.5 •  Timing: China was fortunate to open up to trade just at the moment when the shipping container, invented in the 1950s, was beginning to make possible the creation of global production chains, spanning multiple countries, through steep reductions in long-distance shipping costs. •  A “killer app”: By the late 1980s, culturally similar Taiwan had established a sophisticated electronics industry, which moved en masse to China in the late 1990s, creating a world-class electronics manufacturing base almost overnight.
Arthur R. Kroeber (China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know)
We have lifted EBITDA from a $30 million run rate to $60 million in the 2012 financial year. This has involved rationalisation of the product range and brands, with a reduction of SKUs from 450 to 250, together with some cost savings throughout the group.
Bill Ferris (Inside Private Equity: Thrills, spills and lessons by the author of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained)
• If it’s really that important, it’s something you can define. If it’s something you think exists at all, it’s something you’ve already observed somehow. • If it’s something important and something uncertain, you have a cost of being wrong and a chance of being wrong. • You can quantify your current uncertainty with calibrated estimates. • You can compute the value of additional information by knowing the “threshold” of the measurement where it begins to make a difference compared to your existing uncertainty. • Once you know what it’s worth to measure something, you can put the measurement effort in context and decide on the effort it should take. • Knowing just a few methods for random sampling, controlled experiments, or even merely improving on the judgments of experts can lead to a significant reduction in uncertainty.
Douglas W. Hubbard (How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business)
since most of us just feel guilty or pressured when the cashier asks us to donate, we don’t even get a little hit of good feeling. We certainly don’t get a big hit of feeling good; the companies take all the credit for the giving they do with your nickels. The result is a form of pseudo generosity that is unfulfilling to both shoppers and society. It’s possible that the opportunity costs of these omnipresent products are a reduction in overall participation and contribution rates.
Lucy Bernholz (How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us)
Reduction of bureaucracy: Smart contracts and similar rights management solutions have the potential to reduce bureaucracy and the coordination costs of business transactions
Shermin Voshmgir (Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet)
Call center solutions for small business What does it mean to develop a call center solutions that is small business friendly? It is unique to each organisation, which necessitates that the design be designed on a case-by-case basis. Do you have a partner who is willing to help you build your solution from the ground up? Scaling is a crucial aspect of developing a call center solution for a small organisation. Tiny businesses aren't always small businesses. By the end of a single year, a company that accepts a few dozen calls per week may be taking several hundred calls per day — Alternatively, they could remain the same size. It depends on a number of things, one of which is whether they are committed to providing the resources their customers and employees require for organic growth. Speak with your technology solutions provider about scalability if you want to provide your company the chance to expand. ChaseData offers a variety of scalability alternatives, including solutions that allow for remote agent flexibility, allowing your team to grow and shrink as needed. That way, you'll always be in control of your labour costs, and you'll have the correct number of employees on hand to handle whatever your customer base throws at you! Small Business Still Be Smart A prevalent assumption is that small business call center solutions must be limited in terms of features and capabilities. This is absolutely not the case. When it comes to the technology employed in today's call centers, small can be mighty. One of the most pressing concerns when it comes to increasing efficiency and productivity in a call center – whether large or small – is reducing time spent on repetitive information. Consumers frequently say that they spend several minutes providing simple information to call center personnel, including repeating it several times for verification or because their call has been moved. This process is not only inconvenient for the caller, but it can also be a waste of time and money for your call center! Using smarter technology to limit the quantity of data that must be transmitted is a wonderful approach to improve productivity, efficiency, and customer happiness. It assists in the reduction Our Topics Tags -: ivr solutions in delhi | voice blaster | voice logger | GSM PRI Gateway | GSM VoIP Gateway | Gsm gateway
Asfera Technologies
Costs for batteries dropped significantly—by over 50 percent—between 2015 and 2019 to about $180 per kilowatt-hour. This is largely the result of redesigns and manufacturing scale and reductions in weight. Still, a battery pack that will go two hundred miles or more on a charge costs around $11,000, which is expensive and not yet competitive without subsidies. It is thought that at around $100 per kilowatt-hour, the battery would be competitive with the internal combustion engine. The recent MIT study on mobility posits that the gap may not be closed until 2030.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths in the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle and low income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle and upper income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free from racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latino racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
59% reduction in hospital days. This governor stated that services of doctors of chiropractic result in improved health, satisfaction, safety, and reduced per capita costs. This
Leonard J. Faye (Chiropractic Odyssey: A Journey of Practice, Seminars, Observation and Reading Science)
A new day has dawned. New Secondary Skills are unlocked: Blades: Your many battles have increased your effectiveness with swords and other bladed weapons. Expressive Magic Theory: You now know more about shaping aetherium with your words. Somatic Magic Theory: You have mastered an Improvised Spellform and learned more of magic in the process. Somatic Battle-Weaving: Each action you take, from the stroke of a sword to a dodge, can contribute to a Spellform in the heat of battle. Dramatic Magic Theory: Combining Somatic and Expressive magics is not easy, but you now know more of this difficult path. Aetheric Channeling: Masters of magic long ago learned the secrets of how aether changes states and moves through the Aura. You have taken steps to recreate that knowledge. Critical Breakthrough! You have progressed very far in a short time, understanding the Aura in ways many arcanologists thought lost to time. Aetheric Sensing: Through innovative use, you have advanced in this Skill without the need for a tutor. Aetheric Projection: Few wand users ever go beyond simple bolts of energy, but you recreated an entirely different weapon from raw aether. Critical Breakthrough! Frenzied use of advanced techniques has ingrained them in you, making even such advanced uses seem trivial. Skill greatly increased. Aura Mastery: You have learned how to fill your Aura with aetherium while still allowing aether to flow into you. Provides damage reduction and allows use of Somatic spellforms without an implement. Greatly increases the aetherium costs of such spells. May have other benefits as well. Korrash
Gregory Blackburn (Unbound (Arcana Unlocked #1))
the three major sectors (electricity, transportation, and industry) all produce comparable emissions. But they’d be affected very differently by an economy-wide carbon price. For example, coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40 percent above $60 per barrel. And if that cost were passed through to the pump, gasoline would increase by only some $0.35 per gallon. Since that’s small compared to how much pump prices have varied historically, consumers wouldn’t have much incentive to move away from gasoline. So reductions in emissions from power (and, as it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon atom than does coal.
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
A study of diabetes (a lifestyle-related epidemic in our nation) published in the Journal of Internal Medicine showed that lifestyle-change programs achieved the same beneficial result as drug treatment at a cost of $8,800 versus $29,900—a 70 percent reduction. How often do you get something for 70 percent off?
Tim Ryan (A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit)
American slavery was characterized by massive greed and desire for profit at a terrible human cost, “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of race hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”8 The South Carolina Constitution of 1669 deemed that such a relationship between white masters and their African slaves was “necessary for society to function satisfactorily.” In all dealings with “Negro slaves,” it provided, “every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority.” Slavery took a particularly evil form in the Americas, on the plantation. European colonial plantations produced commodities for the worldwide market, and owners viewed their slaves as commodities to be bought and sold in order to increase profits.
Steven Dundas
If these analysts are right, then the way people actually function is at odds with the myth of the "good citizen." People are motivated essentially by the attempt to "maximize their outcomes." In social situations involving the fate of other people, this involves the reduction of "social and self distress" at minimum cost to other desired resources (Walster et al., 1976). When the costs are high, the "Rational Man" myth is threatened by the person's use of the "justification" mode of restoring "psychological equity" (Walster & Piliavin, 1972); or, as Schwartz (1975) describes, the "reassessment and redefinition of the situation." These reactions are essentially the irrational defenses based upon "denial of the victim's state of need," "denial of the suitability of norms" which define the victim as someone truly innocent and in a state of "genuine need." *Readers may be more familiar with comparable versions of this material that appeared in Walster, Berscheid and Walster, 1976. 30 CHAPTER 1 What some of our best known theorists have described is that we do not act as "good citizens." On the contrary, we are always trying to make the best deal for ourselves. And when it is the most profitable way to respond, we are not very "rational" in the way we justify our self-interested acts. If they are correct, then it is quite obvious that we must go to great lengths to maintain the belief that we live in a just world. But do we?
Melvin Lerner (The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (Critical Issues in Social Justice))
Taking all these things together–the emphasis on pricing, the focus on cost reduction and balance sheet efficiency–an improvement in both margins and return on capital was to be expected. As for valuation, the average free cash flow yields of 6–7 per cent imply growth rates of around GDP or a little less, which suggests that the stock market is underestimating the potential long-run benefit to be derived from market consolidation and improved discipline. In the light of an improving capital cycle among brewers, we find ourselves able, to paraphrase Sir Winston, to overcome our prejudice and begin increasing our exposure to beer. 6
Edward Chancellor (Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15)
The before-after study at BWH showed that CPOE reduced all medication errors by 83% and ADEs by 17% [4]. The estimated cost saving if the system were implemented hospital-wide was $480,000 per year. The controlled study of pharmacist participation on rounds at the MGH showed a 66% reduction of ADEs caused by errors in prescribing [5]. Finally, we had evidence that systems change worked in healthcare.
Lucian L. Leape (Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement)
Plowman thinks that it’s very hard for companies to tackle the public health issue on their own. ‘It would be very difficult for one company to say: “We’re going to take this on,”’ he explained. ‘No one company is that big. It would cost them too much and won’t ultimately make a difference. The rules of the road have to be set by governments. And in the end, business is really good at reacting to that. Remember the sugar tax that was introduced in the UK in 2018 on the soft drinks industry – that has resulted in a massive reduction in sugar consumed in soft drinks.
Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food)
There is no quick fix to ending terrorism and organized violence, but disregarding the way that false definitions of manhood are used to prey on marginalized men who end up joining those groups is ignoring one of the potentially most cost-effective paths to a rigorous and global terrorism reduction strategy.
Liz Plank (For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity)
the additional initial investment cost to the society would be about 2600 billion dollars and there will be a CO2 reduction of about 0.5 billion tons per year. For comparison, if all the existing coal plants were replaced with natural gas plants in the United States, the additional cost to the society would only be about 220 billion dollars and correspondingly there would also be a reduction of about 0.5 billion tons of CO2 per year.
Tushar Choudhary (Critical Comparison of Low-Carbon Technologies: A practical guide to prioritizing energy technologies for climate change mitigation)
The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.
Alexander Betts (Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System)
Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whether the food is tasty and nutritious. It’s like evaluating automobiles entirely by their gasoline mileage, without taking into account safety, comfort, reliability, emissions, or any of the other factors that people consider when buying cars.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
failed to create an arm of the government that will be forever attached to his name, nothing like Obamacare or remotely resembling social security. But the thrust of the Inflation Reduction Act can still be described as transformational—and it will change American life. The theory of the legislation is that the world is poised for a momentous shift. For a generation, the economy has taken tentative steps away from its reliance on fossil fuels. New technologies emerged that lowered the costs of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries; the mass market showed genuine interest in electric vehicles and heat pumps. But the pace of adaptation was slow, painfully slow given the looming changes to the climate. On its own, the economy was never going to evolve in time to avert the worst consequences
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
Overall, the success of SpaceX serves as an example of how re-imagining manufacturing and applying new materials and proprietary innovations can lead to significant cost reductions and novel innovations. It is important to always remain on the lookout for new ideas and improvements and to have a technically capable team in place to make them a reality.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
The bottom line: Most raw materials needed for APM products are common and inexpensive, costing less than one dollar per kilogram. With an adjustment for reductions in mass, this gives a cost equivalent to about ten cents per kilogram, a cost per “effective kilogram.
K. Eric Drexler (Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization)
Paul Turovsky, a Financial Analyst at H.I.G. Capital, brings 5 years of experience to his role. His strengths lie in financial modeling, cost-saving strategies, and automation. Paul conducts comprehensive financial analysis, leading to significant reductions in operational expenses.
Paul Turovsky
The cost of the CAP remained a heavy burden for the EU, with half the budget going to support a sector that employs less than 5 per cent of the working population, much of it for a small minority of the bigger and richer farmers (see Chart 3). By the end of the 1990s, moreover, the twin pressures of enlargement to the east and negotiations within the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO) were forcing the EU into a greater focus on structural reform. New member states, with their large agricultural sectors, were set to drive up costs very significantly, while the need to secure agreement in WTO trade liberalization negotiations was placing increasing pressure on reductions in levels of agricultural support. Consequently, the EU agreed substantial cuts for some products in 1999, as part of wider budgetary negotiations, as well as introducing the notion of a multifunctional CAP (i.e. one that extends into the social and environmental dimensions that surround farming). This recasting of the CAP as a ‘rural’ policy—confirmed by the 2008 ‘health check’—was an important step in helping to unblock the reforms that some states, notably France, had put on hold.
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Chemically induced joy comes at a cost. That cost can be high. Very, very high. So high that you’re going to think twice after reading what science has to say about drug use. One study found that adolescents who smoke just a couple of joints of marijuana show changes in their brains. That’s not a couple of years of smoking or the decades that some adults rack up. It’s just two joints. A research team led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor and psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, discovered that teenagers using cannabis had a nearly 40% greater risk of depression and a 50% greater risk of suicidal ideation in adulthood. Dr. Gobbi stated that “given the large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis, the risk in the population becomes very big. About 7% of depression is probably linked to the use of cannabis in adolescence, which translates into more than 400,000 cases.” The research that revealed these startling numbers was not just a single study of adolescent marijuana use. It was a meta-analysis and review of 11 studies with a total of 23,317 teenage subjects followed through young adulthood. Further, Gobbi’s team only reviewed studies that provided information on depression in the subjects prior to their cannabis use. “We considered only studies that controlled for [preexisting] depression,” said Dr. Gobbi. “They were not depressed before using marijuana, so they probably weren’t using it to self-medicate.” Marijuana use preceded depression. The specific findings of Gobbi’s research include: The risk of depression associated with marijuana use in teens below age 18 is 1.4 times higher than among nonusers. The risk of suicidal thoughts is 1.5 times higher. The likelihood that teen marijuana users will attempt suicide is 3.46 times greater. In adults with prolonged marijuana use, the wiring of the brain degrades. Areas affected include the hippocampus (learning and memory), insula (compassion), and prefrontal cortex (executive functions). The authors of one study stated that “regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex; these regions are rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors and functionally associated with motivational, emotional, and affective processing. Furthermore, these changes correlate with the frequency of cannabis use . . . [while the] . . . age of onset of drug use also influences the magnitude of these changes.” A large number of studies show that cannabis use both increases anxiety and depression and leads to worse health. Key parts of your brain shrink more, based on how early you began smoking weed, and how often you smoke it. That’s a “high” price to pay.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
Unless we know that volumes will be much higher than 10k units, one good strategy is to start off by using a SOM and then do a cost-reduction redesign using the same parts as the SOM when volumes warrant the effort.
Alan Cohen (Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market)
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Domestic creatures don’t need to live by their wits. It behooves them to be accepting of their lot, not uppity. Cows and goats don’t seem very alert to their surroundings; they don’t have to be. And neither do the people who keep them. Archaeologist Colin Groves writes, “Humans have undergone a reduction in environmental awareness in parallel to domestic species and for exactly the same reason.” He explains that domestication is a kind of partnership in which “each partner is, to a degree, sheltered by its association with the other.” Groves says security has cost us a certain dulling of senses, explaining that brain changes have caused in humans “the decline of environmental appreciation.
Carl Safina (Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel)
Companies also contribute to the daily codswallop as they tell us how wonderful they are, or how they can help us “do our bit.” BP’s website, for example, celebrates the reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution they hope to achieve by changing the paint used for painting BP’s ships. Does anyone fall for this? Surely everyone will guess that it’s not the exterior paint job, it’s the stuff inside the tanker that deserves attention, if society’s CO2 emissions are to be significantly cut? BP also created a web-based carbon absolution service, “targetneutral.com,” which claims that they can “neutralize” all your carbon emissions, and that it “doesn’t cost the earth” – indeed, that your CO2 pollution can be cleaned up for just £40 per year. How can this add up? – if the true cost of fixing climate change were £40 per person then the government could fix it with the loose change in the Chancellor’s pocket!
David J.C. MacKay (Sustainable Energy - without the hot air)
Implacable Endurance (Level 1) Effect: Reduces Stamina cost for physical exertion and activated physical abilities by 25%. Does not stack with other Stamina reduction skills. Mana regeneration reduced by 5 Mana per minute permanently. I
Tao Wong (A Fist Full of Credits (System Apocalypse: Relentless, #1))
In buying Treasury securities, our ultimate goal was to precipitate a broad reduction in the cost of credit.†
Ben S. Bernanke (Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
Lots of productivity tools recommend breaking work into small chunks. Smaller tasks are easier to comprehend and complete. When you take on smaller tasks, you’ve invested less time in the product, reducing the cost of change and failure. On its own, controlling task size serves as a poor man’s WIP limit. Simply making tasks smaller isn’t enough; small, unmanaged tasks can accumulate and overwhelm. Reducing task size is only truly effective when coupled with limiting WIP: tasks are completed sooner, results become measurable, and existential overhead is kept to a minimum. Therefore, we should focus on limiting WIP and completing tasks first, and make task size reduction a secondary concern.
Jim Benson (Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life)
Unit costs decline when fixed overhead expenses are spread over more units. At low volumes, scale economies can reduce unit costs substantially. However, these reductions wane in importance as output expands. For example, with $30 million in annual fixed costs, a company’s fixed cost per unit declines by $15 (from $30 to $15) as annual volume doubles from one million to two million units. By comparison, the same company’s fixed cost per unit declines by only $1.50 (from $3 to $1.50) as its annual volume expands from ten million to twenty million units. If that startup’s total addressable market is only big enough to support one company selling twenty million units, then the first competitor to reach that level may achieve an unassailable cost advantage over rivals.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
A learning curve—measured as the percentage unit cost reduction realized with each doubling of cumulative production volume—is typically steepest when labor and machinery add significant value in the production process, as with aircraft assembly or semiconductor manufacturing. Value-added refers to the difference between a product’s final cost and the cost of raw material inputs; this difference consists mostly of labor and equipment costs. Learning-by-doing—for example, finding a way to cut setup times for a new production run—often yields labor and equipment cost savings.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
Some people are natural inventors who prefer to work without the pressure and expectations of the later business phases. Others are ambitious and see innovation as a path toward senior management. Still others are particularly skilled at the management of running an established business, outsourcing, and bolstering efficiencies and wringing out cost reductions. People should be allowed to find the kinds of jobs that suit them best.
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success)
the California case, the rhythms of tax reduction are strong indicators of structural change and, as table 3 demonstrates, show how the Keynesian state’s delegitimation accumulated in waves, culminating, rather than originating, in Tom Bradley’s 1982 and 1986 gubernatorial defeats. The first wave, or capital’s wave, is indicated by the 50 percent decline in the ratio of bank and corporation taxes to personal income taxes between 1967 and 1986 (California State Public Works Board 1987). Starting as early as 1968, voters had agitated for tax relief commensurate with the relief capital had won after putting Ronald Reagan in the governor’s mansion (Mike Davis 1990). But Sacramento’s efforts were continually disappointing under both Republican and Democratic administrations (Kirlin and Chapman 1994). This set in motion the second, or labor’s, wave, in which actual (and aspiring) homeowner-voters reduced their own taxes via Proposition 13 (1978).25 The third, or federal wave, indicates the devolution of responsibility from the federal government onto the state and local levels, as evidenced by declines of 12.5 percent (state) to 60 percent (local) in revenues derived from federal aid. The third wave can be traced to several deep tax cuts the Reagan presidential administration conferred on capital and the wealthiest of workers in 1982 and again in 1986 (David Gordon 1996; Krugman 1994). The sum of these waves produced state and local fiscal crises following in the path of federal crisis that James O’Connor ([1973] 2000) had analyzed early in the period under review when he advanced the “welfare-warfare” concept. As late as 1977–78, California state and local coffers were full (CDF-CEI 1978; Gramlich 1991). By 1983, Sacramento was borrowing to meet its budgetary goals, while county and city governments reached crisis at different times, depending on how replete their reserves had been prior to Proposition 13. Voters wanted services and infrastructure at lowered costs; and when they paid, they tried not to share. Indeed, voters were quite willing to pay for amenities that would stick in place, and between 1977–78 and 1988–89, they actually increased property-based taxes going to special assessment districts by 45 percent (Chapman 1991: 19).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads Book 21))
Although routines and standards are clearly related, they are not identical. As Kindleberger (1983) pointed out, standards are public goods; they reflect interpersonally shared knowledge. We might even say that a standard is a certain kind of “public” routine that helps to coordinate private (individual or intraorganizational) routines. But routines are not only about coordination. As we saw, routines embody potentially useful—we might even say productive—knowledge. In the terminology of Ryle (1949), they reflect “knowledge how.” In some cases, such useful knowledge can be knowledge about how to transact, the possession of which thus reduces transaction costs. My internalized knowledge that I always ought to keep to the right (not the left) as another car approaches might be an example, at least if we construe the interaction between oncoming drivers metaphorically as a transaction. But the skillful exercise of a particular technique for suturing an incision would also be a routine, and not one obviously involving the reduction of transaction costs. Useful knowledge applied to problems of transacting is a special case of a more general phenomenon. As Winter (1988) has suggested, one needs to have economic capabilities (an effective repertoire of routines) in order to be able to transact as well as to be able to produce.6 Like standards, routines can be both enabling and constraining. The possession of an effective repertoire of routines would be crucial to the successful production of product A; but possessing that repertoire might also inhibit a transition to the production of product B. Routines are generally as hard to unlearn as to learn, which may give the advantage in situations of radical innovation to those who have never learned the routines in the first place.7 This is no doubt what Schumpeter (1934) had in mind when he wrote that “new combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them;... in general it is not the
Raghu Garud (Path Dependence and Creation (Organization and Management Series))
Walk through the Dawn: - Hey! The dawn is not just for the student who wakes up to study. Plan your day by walking through your mind before day-break. That is, see to it that all appointments for the day are planned ahead; priority given to cost-reduction and sale-increase activities first. Family and friends are important, but as usual give priority to business meetings first. Chances are that you will not get that opportunity again!     STEP
Siegfried Silverman (PERMANENT WEALTH: 30 Steps to Creating a Lasting Wealth and Legacy)
There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that harm reduction measures encourage drug use. Denying addicts humane assistance multiplies their miseries without bringing them one inch closer to recovery. There is also no contradiction between harm reduction and abstinence. The two objectives are incompatible only if we imagine that we can set the agenda for someone else’s life regardless of what he or she may choose. We cannot. Short of extreme coercion there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to induce another to give up addiction, except to provide the island of relief where contemplation and self-respect can, perhaps, take root. Those ready to choose abstinence should receive every possible support — much more support than we currently provide. But what of those who don’t choose that path? The impossibility of changing other people is not restricted to addictions. Try as we may to motivate another person to be different or to do this or not to do that, our attempts founder on a basic human trait: the drive for autonomy. “And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground. “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” The issue is not whether the addict would be better off without his habit — of course he would — but whether we are going to abandon him if he is unable to give it up. Are we willing to care for human beings who suffer because of their own persistent behaviours, mindful that these behaviours stem from early life misfortunes they had no hand in creating? The harm reduction approach accepts that some people — many people — are too deeply enmeshed in substance dependence for any realistic “cure” under present circumstances. There is, for now, too much pain in their lives and too few internal and external resources available to them. In practising harm reduction we do not give up on abstinence — on the contrary, we may hope to encourage that possibility by helping people feel better, bringing them into therapeutic relationships with caregivers, offering them a sense of trust, removing judgment from our interactions with them and giving them a sense of acceptance. At the same time, we do not hold out abstinence as the Holy Grail and we do not make our valuation of addicts as worthwhile human beings dependent on their making choices that please us. Harm reduction is as much an attitude and way of being as it is a set of policies and methods.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
The estimated value of the water filtration and storage services provided by the earth's forests is more than $4 trillion a year; as a corollary, for every 10 percent reduction of forest land, the cost of treating drinking water grow by about 20 percent.
Gary Ferguson (Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West)