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Thus, all ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits.
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Geoffrey Miller (Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior)
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To summarize what I have said: Aim for the highest; never enter a bar-room; do not touch liquor, or if at all only at meals; never speculate; never indorse beyond your surplus cash fund; make the firm’s interest yours; break orders always to save owners; concentrate; put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket; expenditure always within revenue; lastly, be not impatient, for, as Emerson says, “no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.” I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honourable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work. A basketful of bonds is the heaviest basket a young man ever had to carry. He generally gets to staggering under it. We have in this city creditable instances of such young men, who have pressed to the front rank of our best and most useful citizens. These deserve great credit. But the vast majority of the sons of rich men are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them, and sink to unworthy lives. I would almost as soon leave a young man a curse, as burden him with the almighty dollar. It is not from this class you have rivalry to fear. The partner’s sons will not trouble you much, but look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves, whose parents cannot afford to give them the advantages of a course in this institute, advantages which should give you a decided lead in the race–look out that such boys do not challenge you at the post and pass you at the grand stand. Look out for the boy who has to plunge into work direct from the common school and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark horse that you had better watch.
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Andrew Carnegie (The Road To Business Success)
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One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth. —W.E.B. DUBOIS2
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James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
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The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.
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Michael Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World)
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Next door to the Bensons is Emmet Frag, a retired pacemaker who is credited with inventing the notion of happiness. He’s currently working on a method for categorising ducks based on their singing voice. He’s also the owner of the world’s largest collection of tenor geese.
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St. John Morris (The Bizarre Letters of St John Morris)
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Lando gave his best smile, the very best one, the one he reserved for extremely special occasions. The smile that promised whatever the recipient might want or need—credits, friendship, protection, short-term or long-term love, the wonders of the galaxy itself—if only they would do what the owner of the smile wanted. The Calrissian Special.
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Ben Acker (Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View (From a Certain Point of View #1))
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I also have to credit Bill Bilby, owner of Chelsea Books, with two other important lessons: first, his shop was always tidy and thoughtfully-organized –a remarkable trait in secondhand shops; and second, he was visibly enthusiastic about his stock. He was the first bookseller I knew to describe a book-artefact as “sexy”! A cynic might denigrate this latter trait as a mere sales tactic –because indeed his infectious enthusiasm successfully sold lots of books –but the fact is that the guy was, and is, just a completely mad bibliophile, and being in his shop with him, listening to him effuse about his books, and watching the way he would stroke them and savour them, was profound. It made me realize that we in the trade are actually evangelists of bibliophilia, and embracing and spreading that passion is the only way to ensure our survival.
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Jen Campbell (The Bookshop Book)
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give a credit. Or whatever else we think is best.” Like 140 or so of her fellow employees, Michelle was an owner of ECCO. She was a member of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that controlled 58 percent of the company’s stock. When I met her, her stake was worth $12,000. More important, she felt like an owner and believed she was treated like one. She had a lot of direct contact with the CEO, Ed Zimmer. Among other things, he held a regular monthly lunch with all the people who had a birthday that month, and they talked about themselves and the company and whatever else they wanted to discuss.
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Bo Burlingham (Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big)
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Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession.
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Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
“
Garrett regarded the scene with amazement. "It looks like a Saturday-night market."
"It's to celebrate the new underground London Ironstone line. The railway owner, Tom Severin, is paying out of his own pocket for fairs and concerts across the city."
"Mr. Severin my be taking credit for the celebrations," Garrett said wryly, "but I can assure you, not a shilling of it has come from his own pocket."
Ransom's gaze flashed to her. "You know Severin?"
"I'm acquainted with him," she said. "He's a friend of Mr. Winterborne's."
"But not yours?"
"I would call him a friendly acquaintance." A ripple of delight ran through her as she saw the notch between his brows. Was it possible he was jealous? "Mr. Severin is a schemer," she said. "An opportunist. He contrives everything for his own advantage, even at the expense of his friends."
"A businessman, then," Ransom said flatly.
Garrett laughed. "He certainly is that.
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Lisa Kleypas (Hello Stranger (The Ravenels, #4))
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The supplementary quantity of gold that streams from it into commerce goes at first to the owners of the mine and then by turns to those who have dealings with them. If we schematically divide the whole community into four groups, the mine-owners, the producers of luxury goods, the remaining producers, and the agriculturalists, the first two groups will be able to enjoy the benefits resulting from the reduction in the value of money, the former of them to a greater extent than the latter. But even as soon as we' reach the third group, the situation is altered. The profit obtained by this group as a result of the increased demands of the first two will already be offset to some. extent by the rise in the prices of luxury goods which will have experienced the full effect of the depreciation by the time it begins to affect other goods. Finally, for the fourth group, the whole process will result in nothing but loss.
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Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
“
I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping
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Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
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Article IV The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them. If any person guilty of, or charged with, treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall, upon demand of the Governor or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offense. Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other State.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
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In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?
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David Limbaugh (Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why The Democrats Must Not Win)
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Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.
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Matthew Symonds (Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle)
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How exactly the debt should be funded was to be the most inflammatory political issue. During the Revolution, many affluent citizens had invested in bonds, and many war veterans had been paid with IOUs that then plummeted in price under the confederation. In many cases, these upright patriots, either needing cash or convinced they would never be repaid, had sold their securities to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. Under the influence of his funding scheme, with government repayment guaranteed, Hamilton expected these bonds to soar from their depressed levels and regain their full face value. This pleasing prospect, however, presented a political quandary. If the bonds appreciated, should speculators pocket the windfall? Or should the money go to the original holders—many of them brave soldiers—who had sold their depressed government paper years earlier? The answer to this perplexing question, Hamilton knew, would define the future character of American capital markets. Doubtless taking a deep breath, he wrote that “after the most mature reflection” about whether to reward original holders and punish current speculators, he had decided against this approach as “ruinous to public credit.”25 The problem was partly that such “discrimination” in favor of former debt holders was unworkable. The government would have to track them down, ascertain their sale prices, then trace all intermediate investors who had held the debt before it was bought by the current owners—an administrative nightmare. Hamilton could have left it at that, ducking the political issue and taking refuge in technical jargon. Instead, he shifted the terms of the debate. He said that the first holders were not simply noble victims, nor were the current buyers simply predatory speculators. The original investors had gotten cash when they wanted it and had shown little faith in the country’s future. Speculators, meanwhile, had hazarded their money and should be rewarded for the risk. In this manner, Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions. The knowledge that government could not interfere retroactively with a financial transaction was so vital, Hamilton thought, as to outweigh any short-term expediency. To establish the concept of the “security of transfer,” Hamilton was willing, if necessary, to reward mercenary scoundrels and penalize patriotic citizens. With this huge gamble, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s future financial preeminence.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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The end of the war will see the final ruin of the Jew. The Jew is the incarnation of egoism. And their egoism goes so far that they're not even capable of risking their lives for the defence of their most vital interests.
The Jew totally lacks any interest in things of the spirit. If he has pretended in Germany to have a bent for literature and the arts, that's only out of snobbery, or from a liking for speculation. He has no feeling for art, and no sensibility. Except in the regions where they live in groups, the Jews are said to have reached a very high cultural level! Take Nuremberg, for example: for four hundred years—that is to say, until 1838—it hadn't a single Jew in its population. Result: a situation in the first rank of German cultural life. Put the Jews all together: by the end of three hundred years, they'll have devoured one another. Where we have a philosopher, they have a Talmudistic pettifogger. What for us is an attempt to get to the bottom of things and express the inexpressible, becomes for the Jew a pretext for verbal juggleries. His only talent is for masticating ideas so as to disguise his thought. He has observed that the Aryan is stupid to the point of accepting anything in matters of religion, as soon as the idea of God is recognised. With the Aryan, the belief in the Beyond often takes a quite childish form ; but this belief does represent an effort towards a deepening of things. The man who doesn't believe in the Beyond has no understanding of religion. The great trick of Jewry was to insinuate itself fraudulently amongst the religions with a religion like Judaism, which in reality is not a religion. Simply, the Jew has put a religious camouflage over his racial doctrine. Everything he undertakes is built on this lie.
The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco- Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis!
The Jew has a talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up. Thus comes the moment when nobody understands anything more about the question at issue. To tell you something utterly insignificant, the Jew drowns you in a flood of words. You try to analyse what he said, and you realise it's all wind. The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbours. And that's why people make them professors.
The law of life is : "God helps him who helps himself!" It's so simple that everybody is convinced of it, and nobody would pay to learn it. But the Jew succeeds in getting himself rewarded for his meaningless glibness. Stop following what he says, for a moment, and at once his whole scaffolding collapses. I've always said, the Jews are the most diabolic creatures in existence, and at the same time the stupidest. They can't produce a musician, or a thinker. No art, nothing, less than nothing. They're liars, forgers, crooks. They owe their success only to the stupidity of their victims.
If the Jew weren't kept presentable by the Aryan, he'd be so dirty he couldn't open his eyes. We can live without the Jews, but they couldn't live without us. When the Europeans realise that, they'll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together. The Jew prevents this solidarity. He owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102
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Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
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It is a regrettable fact that whenever a person works for hire the employer begins to see all the hired hand’s efforts as an extension of themselves. Whether rightly justified or not, owners, managers, and bosses only perceive their subservient employees as a separate identity whenever they make a mistake. When all is well and successes roll in, it is a natural as rain for superiors to accept the credit for their underlining’s efforts. Over an extended period, even the most sensitive of overseers can take a dutiful servant for granted. Likewise, a loyal servant can slowly subsume their psychological individuality by constantly addressing their master’s wants and needs.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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If you do what the masses do, you get the following picture: As an employee who is also a homeowner, your working efforts are generally as follows: 1. You work for the company. Employees make their business owner or the shareholders rich, not themselves. Your efforts and success will help provide for the owner’s success and retirement. 2. You work for the government. The government takes its share from your paycheck before you even see it. By working harder, you simply increase the amount of taxes taken by the government. Most people work from January to May just for the government. 3. You work for the bank. After taxes, your next largest expense is usually your mortgage and credit-card debt.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)
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In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) used color-coded maps that encouraged mortgage lenders to withhold credit from certain communities in 239 cities. These maps graded areas—A (“best”—green), B (“still desirable”—blue), C (“definitely declining”—yellow), and D (“hazardous”—red)—encouraging lending in predominantly white and more affluent areas and discouraging lending in areas with residents of color, especially “Negroes.
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Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin)
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Both Aunt Etta and Daddy made sure to tell me that the plantation owner took the credit for the bright leaf variety, that the slave didn’t get any mention at all until many years later. I said that wasn’t fair, and Daddy agreed with me.
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Adele Myers (The Tobacco Wives)
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Hereupon there was appointed an able and faithful committee of gentlemen, who printed, from copper-plates, a just number of bills, and flourished, indented, and contrived them in such a manner, as to make it impossible to counterfeit any of them, without a speedy discovery of the counterfeit: besides which, they were all signed by the hands of three belonging to that committee. These bills being of several sums, from two shillings to ten pounds, did confess the Massachuset-colony to be endebted unto the person in whose hands they were, the sums therein expressed; and provision was made, that if any particular bills were irrecoverably lost, or torn, or worn by the owners, they might be recruited without any damage to the whole in general. The publick debts to the sailors and soldiers, now upon the point of mutiny, (for, Arma Tenenti, Omnia dat, qui Justa negat!)[161] were in these bills paid immediately: but that further credit might be given thereunto, it was ordered that they should be accepted by the treasurer, and all officers that were subordinate unto him, in all publick payments, at five per cent, more than the value expressed in them. The people knowing that the tax-act would, in the space of two years at least, fetch into the treasury as much as all the bills of credit thence emitted would amount unto, were willing to be furnished with bills, wherein it was their advantage to pay their taxes, rather than in any other specie; and so the sailors and soldiers put off their bills, instead of money, to those with whom they had any dealings, and they circulated through all the hands in the colony pretty comfortably.
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Cotton Mather (COTTON MATHER: Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Volume 1 (of 2))
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Compared to a conventional debt instrument, what makes securitization so attractive is the fact that the airline often retains the junior tranches. These become an asset on its balance sheet. Any discount associated with the low credit rating of these layers is more than offset by the discount on the purchase of the aircraft, thereby creating an immediate profit and cash inflow on delivery of the aircraft. Such are the wonders of modern financial alchemy. Under good, even normal, business conditions, the airline makes lease payments to the securitization vehicle. But in a recession or a bankruptcy filing, when payments are suspended, the owners of the senior strata are able to seize the collateral. The junior participants in the securitization have no rights, and any such assets on the airline’s balance sheet must be written down to zero, further increasing the airline’s losses. By this clever piece of financial engineering, the airline gets shiny new planes for an extremely low cost of funds–recently as low as 6 per cent–while equity shareholders carry nearly all of the business risk. That an industry which has rarely earned an acceptable return on capital should have access to such cheap capital is quite astonishing.
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Edward Chancellor (Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15)
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One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner... and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
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W.E.B. Du Bois
“
them. Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much. They wouldn’t know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny—deport them. And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more. And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And the crops changed. Fruit trees took the place of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms: lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes—stoop crops. A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch. And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see that the stooping men were moving along the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid the men, and sold them food, and took the money back. And after a while he did not pay the men at all, and saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might find that he owed money to the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.
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John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath / The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / East of Eden / Of Mice and Men)
“
As my job taught me a little more about America’s class divide, it also imbued me with a bit of resentment, directed toward both the wealthy and my own kind. The owners of Dillman’s were old-fashioned, so they allowed people with good credit to run grocery tabs, some of which surpassed a thousand dollars. I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own damned tab.
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J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
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Human service and its physical capacity are indomitable for today's material reality; there are damages to rightful and truthful harmony. Uncontrollable divisions in the despair of unity. When they believe the country's actual and certain constituency, then exceeding is completely wrought of totalitarianism. Only today's youth will have judged and unfulfilled non-volatile and non-violent actions, like a Gandhiji was owner of this pure cause; they will surely surprise their open energy, or else they wonder and will show credit for the unclosed hike of tyrants one day.
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Viraaj Sisodiya
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It is a slow day in the small town of Pumphandle, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit. A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk, saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. The hotel owner then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100, and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a stimulus package works. – Anonymous
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George Wallace (Laff It Off!)
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Communal forests around the world are being turned into privatized tree farms and preserves so their owners can collect something called “carbon credits,” a lucrative scam I’ll explore later.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
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It is a slow day in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit. A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her “services” on credit. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment, the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill, and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.
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Bernard A. Lietaer (Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity)
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war. This is true whether it’s a Republican or Democratic-leaning entity. Both sides spout the lies delivered by government officials to encourage public support for wars. Whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat, the media will be supportive. It just may be that the owners of the large media entities are closely connected to the military-industrial complex. Our economic policy, and in particular the Federal Reserve, is intertwined in global finance and our foreign policy. Without the power over the creation of money and credit employed by the politicians and central bankers working in secret, most wars could not be fought. The people would never tolerate the taxation and borrowing required to pay for the wars. Inflating the currency is more convenient and less noticeable. To the benefit of those who promote war, the cost of war is hidden and the payment delayed.
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Ron Paul (Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity)
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Sometimes we realize that we are like facebook ,
people using us for themselves , meeting each other via us ,
all credit going to the owner ,
even no one talking about us ,
just using US .
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akash khialani
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debit (or credit) to an account may increase it or decrease it, depending upon what type of account it is: A debit entry will increase an asset account, and it will decrease a liability or owners’ equity account. A credit entry will decrease an asset account, and it will increase a liability or owners’ equity account.
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Mike Piper (Accounting Made Simple: Accounting Explained in 100 Pages or Less)
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Anytime you have multiple offers and you have cash in the mix, the conventionally financed borrower is going to try as hard as they can to look like a cash buyer, even though they’re still being financed,” said Eric Hagstette, owner and principal broker at Inhabit Portland, a real estate company. When sellers have a choice, they prefer the sure thing. Unlike cash, financing can fall through, especially in a market with tighter credit. Buyers who turn up with a check rather than a pre-approved loan are more likely to complete the transaction –and sellers know it. To compete, some buyers are simply borrowing cash from friends and family and financing their houses after closing — bout 14 percent of cash buyers in the greater Portland area between 2011 and the end of 2014, in fact, according to RealtyTrac. Others are overbidding to ram deals through quickly, then waiving the right to negotiate price if an appraiser doesn’t agree. The practice comes with significant risks. It also allows the next guy to price his house just as high, while one sale becomes a benchmark for the starting price of the next, Hagstette said.
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Anonymous
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(Gains work like revenue in that they have credit balances and increase owners’ equity.)
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Mike Piper (Accounting Made Simple: Accounting Explained in 100 Pages or Less)
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My thoughts are on Brux. The alien I never thought I’d see again. My hero. My savior. The alien who won me my freedom. Five years ago, I worked for an old mesakkah—one of the blue aliens with horns. He was the meanest son of a bitch, and spent all his time pinching and hitting me if I didn’t work fast enough. That old alien was a scrapper, too, and he taught me a lot. His hands didn’t work as well as they did when he was younger, so he used me to do the delicate repair work on things. And he starved me and kicked me and treated me like the worst junkyard dog. I’m told that humans are expensive, so I’m not sure why he wanted one if he was just going to beat the crap out of me and abuse me, but maybe he wanted to make sure that whatever slave he got he could beat up on without fear of reprisal. That was my life, dodging slaps and trying frantically to work fast enough to avoid the next hit. Trying to “behave” so I’d get fed that day. Brux showed up at the scrapper’s junk hole one day. I’m not even sure what he was looking for. But he watched the old guy beat up on me while I tried to work and then turned around and left. Which made my owner hit me even harder. Neither of us had counted on Brux returning, though. He did. Threw a bag of credits onto the counter and demanded my price. My owner didn’t even haggle. Just named some astronomically high price and Brux shoved the bag of credits across the counter and unlocked my collar. He led me to a hotel that night and ordered food. I scarfed everything down and showered, and cried I was so happy. The moment I got out of the shower and in Brux’s oversized tunic, I sat next to my new owner and let him know just how happy I was. I seduced him. Brux declined my advances, like any decent guy would. But I had a full belly and I was away from that old monster, and at this point, anything would be better. I put my mouth all over him, ignoring his attempts to brush me aside, and sat myself down onto his lap—and his cock. For all that he’s an enormous alien with tree trunks for arms and legs, his cock was the perfect size. Better than that, he was exceedingly gentle with me and made sure that I wasn’t hurting or scared. He came, I didn’t, but it didn’t matter to me. It was about connection, and gratitude, and just celebrating that my circumstances had changed. But I think it made Brux feel weird about things. Because in the morning, he took me directly to the doorstep of Lord va’Rin and left me there.
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Ruby Dixon (When She's Handy: A Risdaverse Short Story)
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Goldfish Memory
For decades people believed that the goldfish memory lasts only for 3 seconds. But over the years, this belief has been debunked multiple times with experiments and research.
Goldfish are one of the most popular pet fish, and if you are a proud owner of a goldfish, you would be happy to know that your fish remembers you.
Disproving the 3 seconds memory myth
Studies show that your goldfish memory spans more than three months. In one of the studies, the scientists added a lever to the goldfish tank that dispensed food when pressed.
The goldfish in the tank quickly learned to press the lever to get food. The goldfish started to come to the lever whenever they were hungry.
Later the scientist changed the process and adjusted the lever to dispense food only at a particular time within a one-hour window.
Soon the goldfish learned to return to the lever each day around that time when the lever dispensed food.
This experiment proves that goldfish do have memories that span more than 3 seconds.
In another study, the scientists used music to train the goldfish. Whenever they brought food for the goldfish, a particular piece of music would be playing. The goldfish learned to associate this music with food. Later, the scientists released the goldfish into the wild. After about five months, they played the same piece of music, and the goldfish returned to the same feeding place.
The results of the above experiments would have been different if the goldfish has a 3-second memory.
Are goldfish smart?
The answer is yes they are! Besides having better than a 3-second memory, goldfish are also quite intelligent in their own right. They have shown an incredible ability to learn and process information.
In many cases, your pet goldfish have been found to remember their owners' sound and to distinguish the one who feeds them.
They are usually scared when they meet new people, and it is only after repeatedly seeing the person that they no longer fear them.
There have also been instances where goldfish do complex activities like swimming through a maze or push a ball into a net. This proves that the goldfish have better memory and can perform far more complex tasks than we give them credit.
Goldfish evolving over millions of years
Scientists believe that the entire fish category has evolved over hundreds of years and have learned to remember where and how they can find food, what predators look like, how to stay safe, and basic survival instincts.
Conclusion
From all the research and studies that have been conducted, it is easy to deduce that when you keep your goldfish in a bowl with the same accessories for years, it will not provide a scintillating environment for the fish to thrive.
The goldfish may not be the smartest species in the animal kingdom, but they do have a memory that is more than just 3 seconds.
Hence, it is only fair that if you bring home a goldfish as a pet, give it the environment it needs to enjoy a healthy and stimulating life.
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Goldfish Memory
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The Ultimate Minimalist Wallets For Men: Functionality Meets Style?
More than just a way of transporting essentials like money and ID, the simplest men’s wallets also are a chance to precise your taste and elegance.
The perfect minimalist wallet may be a marriage of form and performance. It’s hard-wearing, ready to withstand everyday use, and has high-end design appeal. the perfect wallet is one that you simply can take enjoyment of whipping out at the top of a meal with a client or the in-laws. This one’s on me.
Your wallet should complement your lifestyle. Perhaps you’re an on-the-go professional rushing from an office meeting to a cocktail bar. or even you’re a stay-at-home parent who takes pride in your fashion-forward accessories. No single wallet-owner is that the same. Your wallet should say something about your unique personality.
Whether you’re seeking an attention-grabbing luxury accessory or something more understated and practical, there’s a wallet that’s got your name thereon. Here’s a variety of the simplest men’s wallets for each taste, style, and purpose.
Here Is That The List Of Comfortable Wallets For Men
Here, we'll introduce recommended men's outstandingly fashionable wallets. If you would like to be a trendy adult man, please ask it.
1- Stripe Point Bi-Fold Wallet (Paul Smith)
"Paul Smith" may be a brand that's fashionable adult men, not just for wallets but also for accessories like clothes and watches. it's a basic series wallet that uses Paul Smith's signature "multi-striped pattern" as an accent.
Italian calf leather with a supple texture is employed for the wallet body, and it's a typical model specification of a bi-fold wallet with 1 wallet, 2 coin purses, 4 cardholders.
2- Zippy Wallet Vertical (Louis Vuitton)
"Louis Vuitton" may be a luxury brand that's so documented that it's called "the king of high brands" by people everywhere the planet . a trendy long wallet with a blue lining on the "Damier Graffiti", which is extremely fashionable adult men.
With multiple pockets and compartments, it's excellent storage capacity. With a chic, simple and complicated design, and having a luxury brand wallet that everybody can understand, you'll feel better and your fashion is going to be dramatically improved.
3- Grange (porter)
"Poker" is that the main brand of Yoshida & Co., Ltd., which is durable and highly functional. Yoshida & Co., Ltd. is now one of Japan's leading brands and is extremely popular not only in Japan but also overseas.
The charm of this wallet is that the cow shoulder leather is made in Italy, which has been carefully tanned with time and energy. because of the time-consuming tanning process, it's soft and sturdy, and therefore the warm taste makes it comfortable to use.
4- Bellroy Note Sleeve
The Note Sleeve is just the simplest all-around wallet in Bellroy’s collection. If you don’t want to spend plenty of your time (or money) researching the simplest wallet, you'll stop here. This one has everything you would like. And it's good too!
This wallet will easily suit your cash, coins, and up to eleven cards during a slim profile. The Note Sleeve also has quick-access slots for your daily cards and a cargo area with a convenient pull-tab for the credit cards you employ less frequently.
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Funky men
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Business owner Joshua Mauney, pastor, has built Phoenix Home Remodel into a million-dollar business in one year. He credits hard work for his success. It isn't unusual to see Joshua Mauney, pastor, working 12-hour days to get things done. When he isn't working, he's spending time with his wife and four children.
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Joshua Mauney Pastor
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However, if these factories could be consolidated, the owner of a Swedish match monopoly could raise prices and make a fortune. Some factories in Sweden recently had combined, to form the Jönköping-Vulcan trust, but the men running the trust were conservative and slow. Ivar was sure he could dominate them. He began using loans from the Swedish Credit Bank to buy match factories throughout Sweden. During the next eight years, Ivar parlayed a few family match factories into a conglomerate. He modernized factories and expanded overseas sales. Production increased from 90,000 cases in 1914 to double that in 1916; his profits more than tripled.12 He reduced costs by purchasing the companies that made his machines, as well as companies that supplied chlorate acid potash for the tips. The hardball tactics Ivar used to take over competitors must have reminded Lee Higg’s partners of John D. Rockefeller, who used a similar approach to acquire competitors of his company Standard Oil.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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What does a merchant do when a potential customer walks into a store and wants to purchase a ton of goods on credit? A solution was offered by the “The Society of Guardians for the Protection of Trade against Swindlers and Sharpers,” established in 1776. This society pooled data from 550 merchants to collect information on the reputation of customers. This would make it much harder for a bad customer to defraud multiple merchants. Its key principle: “Every member is bound to communicate to the Society without delay, the Name and Description of any Person who may be unfit to trust.” In other words, this was the beginning of credit scores as a means to assess the trustworthiness of a customer for loans—no swindlers or sharpers allowed. This Society of Guardians was not the only credit bureau—thousands of similar small organizations were formed over the years, collecting individual names and publishing books with various comments and gossip. Modern giants Experian and Equifax grew from these small, local bureaus. Experian started as the Manchester Guardian Society in the early 1800s, eventually acquiring other bureaus to become one of the world’s largest. And Equifax grew from a Tennessee grocery store in the late 1800s, where the owners started compiling their own lists of creditworthy consumers. These bureaus tended to combine into larger bureaus over time because of what’s often described as a “data network effect.” When a bureau works with more merchants, it means more data, which means the risk predictions on loans will be more accurate. This makes it more attractive for additional merchants to join, who contribute even more data, and so on. Being able to accurately assess lending risk allows the rest of the network to function—consumers can borrow to get the goods they want, merchants can sell their products profitably, and banks can help underwrite the loans. This network is held together by credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, who centralize consumer data.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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The very best employee owners are not followers. They are believers. They are collaborators not caring who gets the credit. They are financially responsible yet motivated. They have high expectations for their boss, for their firm, and for themselves. They think in the long run. They hustle and are customer-focused. They are a diverse representation of the American melting pot. They are proud of where they work. They are ready for accelerated leadership in a world of exponentially faster growth.
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Greg Graves (Create Amazing: Turning Your Employees into Owners for Explosive Growth)
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You work for the company. Employees make their business owner or the shareholders rich, not themselves. Your efforts and success will help provide for the owner’s success and retirement. 2.You work for the government. The government takes its share from your paycheck before you even see it. By working harder, you simply increase the amount of taxes taken by the government. Most people work from January to May just for the government. 3.You work for the bank. After taxes, your next largest expense is usually your mortgage and credit-card debt. The problem with simply working harder is that each of these three levels takes a greater share of your increased efforts. You need to learn how to have your increased efforts benefit you and your family directly.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!)
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Financial debt is the act of borrowing money from an outside party to quickly finance the operations of a business—with the promise to repay the principal plus the agreed-upon rate of interest in a timely manner. Under the right circumstances, this can accelerate the growth of a business considerably while allowing the owner to retain ownership, reduced taxes, and lower interest rates. On the other hand, the inability to pay back this debt on time can adversely affect credit rating, result in higher interest rates, cash flow difficulties, and other restrictions.
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Premanand Chandrasekaran (Domain-Driven Design with Java - A Practitioner's Guide: Create simple, elegant, and valuable software solutions for complex business problems)
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Collin Pittman is a finance manager and business owner with a diverse skill set. Based in Rochester, NY, Collin is an expert in credit repair and finance. He is also an experienced horse trainer with a passion for equine training. he hopes to expand his business and help people form meaningful bonds with horses.
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Collin Pittman
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Collin Pittman is a finance manager and business owner with a passion for equine training. Based in Rochester, NY, Collin is an expert in credit repair and finance. His long-term goals include expanding his business and running a successful equine training facility, all while making a positive impact on the community.
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Collin Pittman
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Credit extension, invoicing policy, payable policy, dealing with customers, and negotiating with suppliers, banks, and internal staff are all management disciplines that have a direct impact on the cash cycle.
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Dawn Fotopulos (Accounting for the Numberphobic: A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners)
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Their LLC has good credit and is able to borrow $600,000 without the need for personal guarantees. The loan has the effect of increasing each owner’s tax basis by $200,000. Because distributions are taxed only when they exceed an owner’s basis, this means that Lisa, Lyn and Lovella can each receive $200,000 in profit distributions tax free from the LLC.
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Garrett Sutton (Start Your Own Corporation: Why the Rich Own Their Own Companies and Everyone Else Works for Them (Rich Dad Advisors))
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, all new equipment purchases used in business create a tax credit for the business owner. This credit is commonly called an investment tax credit.
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Tom Wheelwright (Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes)
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This is where LO3 Energy ended up when it developed its Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, a prototype of interconnected households and businesses that share locally generated solar power. The community was motivated by a desire to give environmentally conscious consumers and users the capacity to know they are buying clean, locally generated power as opposed to just helping pay their utility buy renewable credits that fund green energy production elsewhere in the United States. In the Transactive Grid, building owners install solar panels that are then linked together with those of their neighbors in a distribution network, using affordable smart meters and storage units, as well as inverters that allow the grid’s owners to sell power back to the public grid. The magic sauce, though, comes from a private blockchain that regulates the sharing of power among the smart meters, whose data is logged into that distributed ledger. And in the summer of 2017, LO3 took the process a step further by developing an “exergy token” to drive market mechanisms within and among decentralized microgrids such as Brooklyn’s. (Exergy is a vital concept for measuring energy efficiency and containing wasteful practices; it doesn’t just measure the amount of energy generated but also the amount of useful work produced per each given amount of energy produced.) Note that LO3’s microgrid is based on a private blockchain. Microgrids offer one of those cases when this model is likely sufficient, since the community is founded on a fixed group of users who will all agree to the terms of use. That means that some of the large-scale processing challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum can be avoided and thus that the high transaction power of a blockchain could be harnessed without requiring the implementation of the Lightning Network and other “off-chain” scaling solutions currently under development.
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.) The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’.
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Anthony David Moody (Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years)
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In a Balance Sheet, Liabilities represent Sources, and Assets represent Uses of funds. There are two principal sources of funds, Owners and Outsiders. Each invests in two ways.
Owners make a direct contribution when they invest their money, and an indirect contribution when they leave behind the profits which they were entitled to take home. Outsiders invest by either lending money (loans) or by lending goods (suppliers’ credit). The resources so raised are deployed in two ways:
towards creation of infrastructure (purchase of fixed assets) and towards working capital.
Working capital has three components, namely inventory, cash and bank balances, and debtors or receivables.
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Anil Lamba (Romancing The Balance Sheet)
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If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, migration to town.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford World's Classics))
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A lot of business owners spend time solving problems they don’t have. Rob Walling refers to this as premature optimization. Examples include: 1. Getting a flawless credit card payment process setup before they have customers. 2. Optimizing their website before they have traffic. 3. Hiring staff before they have work for them. 4. Investing in the best systems before they have enough work to warrant it. Normally these decisions stem from believing that when you have a problem, you won’t be able to resolve it quickly.
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Dan Norris (The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch)
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The Mercantilism represented by the Hamilton-Clay tradition transcends the history of the American political economy in its significance. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, France stood out for state commitment to internal improvements: in 1666, Colbert had convinced Louis XIV to finance the Canal du Midi as one aspect of the generations-long campaign to establish centralized state authority over the still-feudal French nation. Since time immemorial however, the public credit of the state had been predominantly devoted to the financing of war, whether the state was in the hands of a feudal king, an absolute monarch, a republican city-state, or the conflation of royal power circumscribed by parliamentary representatives of the propertied classes and tempered by "the mob" that emerged in Britain from 1688. The game between the financial markets and the state was played out over the terms on which the owners of liquid capital would fund the state's armies relative to the problematic likelihood of their being repaid.
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BIll Janeway
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At this time, our personal dosimeters—accumulators that registered doses of contamination a person got during his working time—were checked. Usually, these small badges were fastened to the outer part of our clothes, on our chests. Periodically, the dosimeters were examined in the laboratory, where they were burned in a special way, doses were measured, and then the badges were returned to their owners. With this procedure, the dosimeter “forgot” its previous history and was ready to register doses again. We fought against dosimeters constantly and secretly. The point was that a person having received a dose of 25 roentgen (25 R/h) should, according to the medical terms, leave Chernobyl immediately. With this, he got five months’ salary. Good money in this time. Why 25 R/h was the limit, it is difficult for me to say. I am not a specialist. I just remembered for myself that if you got more than 100 R/h, you got radiation sickness. When the authorities came to this decision, those working at the station became diametrically opposed to it. One pole—not very numerous—consisted of those who wanted to leave the Zone as soon as possible and with the five-month salary. These people, who aspired later to the reputation of Chernobyl heroes, usually tried to “forget” their accumulators and other types of dosimeters in dangerous, high-radiation places, and then would return secretly to get them. During the checking, the desired dose of 25 R/h was discovered; and if everything was done well and there was no evidence of swindle, the “hero” went back to his motherland with money and respect. There he started his struggle for privileges with more energy than a person who had actually gotten such a high dose could possibly have. The major part of the Kurchatovers—and it did them credit—took the opposite pole. People who did research in areas with doses of hundreds and thousands roentgen per hour tried to leave their dosimeters in safe places, or to shield the instruments so that they couldn't register that fatal 25 R/h. Then they could stay in Chernobyl. This was the secret war with our accumulators. The authorities knew everything about it, but did nothing. They needed specialists like air.
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Alexander Borovoi (My Chernobyl: The Human Story of a Scientist and the nuclear power Plant Catastrophe)
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If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
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When condominiums don’t meet government-backed lenders’ standards they become non-warrantable. This means that buyers cannot get standard loans for these properties. They will have to pay cash or pay exorbitant rates through private lenders. When a building is full of non-warrantable condos, the pool of buyers shrinks and lowers the condo’s value. One might think that newer projects would have lower maintenance costs than older projects. But this isn’t always true. Some builders set monthly fees low while they advertise the project. This attracts bargain buyers, but owners soon discover they have inadequate reserves. The monthly fees then skyrocket. Even if the homeowners successfully sue the builder, it is hard to sell any properties while litigation is pending, and values drop. Most states have specific forms for condominium transactions in which the association discloses finances and reserves. Buyers must sign and verify they have examined the financial condition of the project. Pay attention to past history. How old is the roof? When were improvements last made? How often do association dues increase? Even though many people don’t investigate these issues, a home’s value depends on them. CHAPTER 7 BANK FINANCING Banks have a new image. Now you have ‘a friend,’ your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens?
— Alan King Bank lending standards and terms change daily. This chapter provides general principles that should prove useful over the long term. We will examine how to borrow from banks to acquire or refinance a home. Please note the term “banks” as used here includes credit unions and other major financial institutions. There’s another chapter on non-bank lending to help those who don’t meet the criteria set by major lending institutions.
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Alex Goldstein (No Nonsense Real Estate: What Everyone Should Know Before Buying or Selling a Home)
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The famed British plumber and owner of the “Venerable Thomas Crapper Co.” is credited with popularizing the toilet and improving flushing in turn-of-the-century London. His eye for elegant toilet design earned him work for the Royal Family and a place in the annals of plumbing history.
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Deuce Flanagan (Everybody Poops 410 Pounds a Year: An Illustrated Bathroom Companion for Grown-Ups (Illustrated Bathroom Books))
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[1916] The IWW’s involvement in the [Minnesota] Iron Range’s labor unrest led mine company owners to take extreme actions and, just as in other conflict locations, they mobilized the businesses and municipal offices under their ownership. All mail and telegrams to and from Virginia were halted and reviewed. In other locations, including Biwabik, Aurora, and Eveleth, general stores turned away miners and their famlies. When the strikers formed their own cooperative for supplies and groceries, Oliver Iron Mining Company pressured wholesalers to serve notice that all credit would be curtailed pending the strike, and that payments for supplies must be made weekly. Meanwhile Sheriff Meining publicly announced new jail sentences for other agitators and miners for simply saying, “Hello Fellow Worker,” carrying a red IWW membership card, or discussing industrial unionism on public streets.
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Jane Little Botkin (Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family)
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The fight started in earnest an hour after darkness had fallen, when at 19.35 the first of the Knappen boats made its rendezvous with ON 166. Adolf Oelrich, in U-92, on his second war patrol and still with only one Allied ship to his credit, was eager to improve his score. He pounced on the 10,000-ton Empire Trader when he found her straggling behind the convoy. She was so obviously old and tired that Oelrich used only one torpedo on her. He had miscalculated, the thirty-five-year-old British ship was a product of an age when ships were built to outlast their owners, and she stayed afloat.
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Bernard Edwards (The Twilight of the U-Boats)