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Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately:
I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us."
And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real.
Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
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Money flows to people who respect it. Treat every dollar like it's related to a Billion.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
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A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the program manager from AARP had a brilliant idea: he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes. What was going on here? How could zero dollars be more attractive than $30? When money was mentioned, the lawyers used market norms and found the offer lacking, relative to their market salary. When no money was mentioned they used social norms and were willing to volunteer their time. Why didn’t they just accept the $30, thinking of themselves as volunteers who received $30? Because once market norms enter our considerations, the social norms depart.
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
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A man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on ten dollars, and has everything else he desires, he really is rich.
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John D. Rockefeller
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All the currencies of Europe are relatives of the Dollar.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
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We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion.
Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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We have to examine the extent to which we export poverty to other societies. When we decide that we will import products from China that are produced by people earning less than a dollar an hour, and grant their country most-favored-nation status (political contributions notwithstanding), we are deciding to make American workers who must earn the minimum wage compete with them. I am not suggesting that we close the doors to China or to Mexico, but I am suggesting that we look very carefully at the web of international relationships that we are creating. At the very minimum, we should understand that we have two choices in our country: we can raise world living standards by exporting those standards, or we can lower living standards- not only the world’s but also our own- by deciding that it is acceptable for the products of exploited labor to enter this country.
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Julianne Malveaux
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Americans. They came right out with things. Hitchens family lore related the tale of how once, when I was but a toddler, my parents were passing with me through an airport and ran into some Yanks. 'Real cute kid,' said these big and brash people without troubling to make a formal introduction. They insisted on photographing me and, before breaking off to resume their American lives, pressed into my dimpled fist a signed dollar bill in token of my cuteness. This story was often told (I expect that Yvonne and the Commander had been to an airport together perhaps three times in their lives) and always with a note of condescension. That was Americans for you: wanting to be friendly all right, but so loud, and inclined to flash the cash.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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Seize the opportunity in front of you. Imagine. Invent. Disrupt. Do good. I know that you must be passionate, unreasonable, and a little bit crazy to follow your own ideas and do things differently. But it’s worth it. Life grows relative to one’s investment in it.
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Marc Benioff (Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry)
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The goal here is to document what YOU do, not what you think everyone else should do. When you position yourself as someone who is on a journey and document your process and your progress, you become relatable, and that is what audiences long for. Some of my most popular videos feature me failing, often. It’s fascinating that people want to see what’s really going on, not the highlight reel we think they want.
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Noah Kagan (Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours)
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The USS Cole was a billion-dollar command and attack ship equipped with computer-linked radar that could follow more than one hundred airplanes, ships, and missile targets at once. It had relatively little defense, however, against three suicide bombers in a thousand-dollar skiff.
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Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
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What amazes us is that parents all over the world are literally paying thousands of dollars in college tuition so that their sons and daughters can be taught the “truth” that there is no truth, not to mention other self-defeating postmodern assertions such as: 8220;All truth is relative” (Is that a relative truth?); “ There are no absolutes” (Are you absolutely sure?); and, “It’s true for you but not for me!” (Is that statement true just for you, or is it true for everyone?) “True for you but not for me” may be the mantra of our day, but it’s not how the world really works. Try saying that to your bank teller, the police, or the IRS and see how far you get! Of course these modern mantras are false because they are self-defeating. But for those who still blindly believe them, we have a few questions: If there really is no truth, then why try to learn anything? Why should any student listen to any professor? After all, the professor doesn’t have the truth. What’s the point of going to school, much less paying for it? And what’s the point of obeying the professor’s moral prohibitions against cheating on tests or plagiarizing term papers?
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Norman L. Geisler (I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist)
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Oh, look, there are jobs available in Jacksonville! Today there are two jobs for me and 1.2 million other people in this city to choose from. I can either go into the advertising industry by being a sign spinner, which sounds perfect for me because I really enjoy standing in the heat and getting honked at by drivers, or I can go into public relations by being a part time host/hostess at the Applebees on Old. St. Augustine Rd. Both of these jobs sound great, but since the competition for them is so stiff, I’m really regretting not having taken on another $50,000 dollars of debt and getting a master’s degree. I’m not feeling confident that I’m qualified for either of them.
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Jarod Kintz (Gosh, I probably shouldn't publish this.)
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Life grows relative to one’s investment in it.
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Marc Benioff (Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry)
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The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.
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Leonard Mlodinow (The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos)
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rather than trying to work hard and figure out an item’s absolute value, when given the choice, we take the path of relatively least resistance.
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Dan Ariely (Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter)
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MURRAY (with a cynical laugh). Interesting? On a small town rag? A month of it, perhaps, when you're a kid and new to the game. But ten years. Think of it! With only a raise of a couple of dollars every blue moon or so, and a weekly spree on Saturday night to vary the monotony. (He laughs again.) Interesting, eh? Getting the dope on the Social of the Queen Esther Circle in the basement of the Methodist Episcopal Church, unable to sleep through a meeting of the Common Council on account of the noisy oratory caused by John Smith's application for a permit to build a house; making a note that a tugboat towed two barges loaded with coal up the river, that Mrs. Perkins spent a week-end with relatives in Hickville, that John Jones Oh help! Why go on? Ten years of it! I'm a broken man. God, how I used to pray that our Congressman would commit suicide, or the Mayor murder his wife just to be able to write a real story!
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Eugene O'Neill (Plays by Eugene O'Neill)
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One of the ways in which cooperatives rectify the injustices of capitalism is by instituting a relatively equal compensation-scheme for their members. While in the U.S. the average ratio of CEO compensation in the Fortune 500 companies to the ordinary worker’s has recently been reported as 344:1,49 in co-ops the pay-differential between management and the average worker rarely exceeds 4:1. In collectives, everyone is usually paid the same amount. For example, a British study from the 1980s reports that all of the dozens of small co-ops it researched had lower pay-differentials than conventional businesses, and most had little or no differential at all.50 At Arizmendi Bakery everyone currently receives about 20 dollars an hour plus a percentage of the year’s profits. The worker-owners of Mondragon Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Canada earn the same rate of pay. At Equal Exchange, a relatively large co-op, there is a 4:1 pay ratio.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success. Sundar notes that “sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex on those signals when people give something up.* And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn’t related to them, but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team, like Steph Curry jumping up and down when Kevin Durant hits a big shot. You can’t fake that.
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Eric Schmidt (Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell)
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At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2001, as died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow.
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Singer Sewing Company (Practical Ethics)
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It’s always struck me as the ultimate insult to pay to park at hospitals; they incarcerate your friends and relations in rooms that cost six or seven hundred dollars a day, then put a little sting in by charging a few extra bucks to visit them.
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Sara Paretsky (Killing Orders (V.I. Warshawski, #3))
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fact that it’s a fire. Non-judgmental concentration trains your brain to realize that the people and things in your life don’t exist relative to you; they simply exist. If you can take yourself out of the equation, you’ll have a much clearer view.
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Brad Jacobs (How to Make a Few Billion Dollars)
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Facebook, Oliver. You’d know what I’m talking about if you logged in more than once. All you’ve posted is an off-centered picture of a blurry raccoon.” “I’m still getting acclimated to the camera feature.” “You also only have two friends, and they’re both fake accounts.” “They told me I had funds available in a deceased relative’s account that they would help me retrieve. It sounded promising.” A sharp laugh hits me. “You didn’t even accept my friend request.” “You weren’t offering me two-million dollars.” Another laugh that prompts my own.
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Jennifer Hartmann (Lotus)
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Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?
Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?
Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.
As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
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Hunter S. Thompson
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Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.
The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.
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Colson Whitehead (Zone One)
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The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…
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Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
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Norton and his colleagues would call the psychology behind DiAngelo’s mother’s warnings “last place aversion.” In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status. Norton and his colleagues used games where they gave participants the option to give money to either people who had more money than they had, or those who had less. In general, people gave money to those who had less—except for people who were in the second-to-last place in the money distribution to begin with. These players more often gave their money to the people above them in the distribution so that they wouldn’t fall into last place themselves. The study authors also looked at real-world behaviors and found that lower-income people are less supportive of redistributive policies that would help them than logic would suggest. Even though raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum “and thus those most likely to ‘drop’ into last place” alongside the workers at the bottom expressed less support. “Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,” the study authors wrote.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education.
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Alec J. Ross (The Industries of the Future)
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What does it mean to invade a country, topple its leader, face a raging insurgency, open a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict across a region, spend trillions of dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and permanently alter hundreds of thousands of American lives? Something in the character of post-9/11 America seemed unable, or unwilling, to process the scale of the catastrophic decision, and the spillover effects it had—an emboldened Iran, embattled Gulf states, a Syrian dictator who didn’t want to be next, a Russian “strongman who resented American dominance, a terrorist organization that would turn itself into an Islamic State, and all the individual human beings caught in between.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
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Politicians and their relatives provide ample fodder as well, with elected officials who enter politics making between one hundred and two hundred thousand dollars a year, yet somehow amass wealth in the tens of millions over their tenure in government; aside from being humble public servants, apparently they are also astute investors. Politics is big business. Is
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Jack Carr (In the Blood (Terminal List, #5))
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When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a family gathering the question every boy and girl is asked sooner or later: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, “I want to be a billionaire.” “Wouldn’t you rather be president?” the relative asked. “No, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.
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John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
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SOCIAL/GENERAL ICEBREAKERS
1. What do you think of the movie/restaurant/party?
2. Tell me about the best vacation you’ve ever taken.
3. What’s your favorite thing to do on a rainy day?
4. If you could replay any moment in your life, what would it be?
5. What one thing would you really like to own? Why?
6. Tell me about one of your favorite relatives.
7. What was it like in the town where you grew up?
8. What would you like to come back as in your next life?
9. Tell me about your kids.
10. What do you think is the perfect age? Why?
11. What is a typical day like for you?
12. Of all the places you’ve lived, tell me about the one you like the best.
13. What’s your favorite holiday? What do you enjoy about it?
14. What are some of your family traditions that you particularly enjoy?
15. Tell me about the first car you ever bought.
16. How has the Internet affected your life?
17. Who were your idols as a kid? Have they changed?
18. Describe a memorable teacher you had.
19. Tell me about a movie/book you’ve seen or read more than once.
20. What’s your favorite restaurant? Why?
21. Tell me why you were named ______. What is the origin of your last name?
22. Tell me about a place you’ve visited that you hope never to return to.
get over your mom’s good intentions.
23. What’s the best surprise you’ve ever received?
24. What’s the neatest surprise you’ve ever planned and pulled off for someone else?
25. Skiing here is always challenging. What are some of your favorite places to ski?
26. Who would star as you in a movie about your life?
Why that person?
27. Who is the most famous person you’ve met?
28. Tell me about some of your New Year’s resolutions.
29. What’s the most antiestablishment thing you’ve ever done?
30. Describe a costume that you wore to a party.
31. Tell me about a political position you’d like to hold.
32. What song reminds you of an incident in your life?
33. What’s the most memorable meal you’ve eaten?
34. What’s the most unforgettable coincidence you’ve experienced or heard about?
35. How are you able to tell if that melon is ripe?
36. What motion picture star would you like to interview? Why?
37. Tell me about your family.
38. What aroma brings forth a special memory?
39. Describe the scariest person you ever met.
40. What’s your favorite thing to do alone?
41. Tell me about a childhood friend who used to get you in trouble.
42. Tell me about a time when you had too much to eat or drink.
43. Describe your first away-from-home living quarters or experience.
44. Tell me about a time that you lost a job.
45. Share a memory of one of your grandparents.
46. Describe an embarrassing moment you’ve had.
47. Tell me something most people would never guess about you.
48. What would you do if you won a million dollars?
49. Describe your ideal weather and why.
50. How did you learn to ski/hang drywall/play piano?
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Debra Fine (The Fine Art of Small Talk: How to Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills and Leave a Positive Impression!)
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Family is the nucleus unit of any society. Although modern science allows us to create life in a petri dish, I believe God designed humans—like all other animals—to be born of a male and a female union in the context of family according to His divine plan for our spiritual development. Family grounds us and grows us. We first learn how to relate to others through our family relationships. We learn to change and adapt according to the needs of our family. For instance, a mother will notice the subtle moves and shiftings of her baby in her womb. As the baby squirms and moves about, the mother will adjust her body to make the baby more comfortable. Sometimes I think back to the days when I carried my own babies. Tending to their tiniest needs, I began to understand that God tends to our smallest needs just as well.
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Taffi Dollar (Embracing the Love God Wants You to Have: A Life of Peace, Joy, and Victory)
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Price controls and the direct allocation of resources by political institutions require much more explicit knowledge on the part of a small number of planners than a market economy requires so that it can be coordinated by prices to which millions of dollars respond. people based on first-hand knowledge of their own circumstances and preferences, and the relatively low prices that each individual must handle.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
“
A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a
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James Rickards (Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis)
“
Okay,” Amy said, blowing out a breath. “Our grandmother Grace left a will that gave us a choice between a million dollars and a hunt to find thirty-nine clues, which, when we put them together, will make us the most powerful people in the world. So we chose the hunt. Along with various assorted horrible Cahill relatives, all of whom have tried to kill us at one time or another.” Shep sighed. “If you don’t want to tell me, I guess that’s up to you.
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Jude Watson (In Too Deep (The 39 Clues, #6))
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Still, it is argued that millions of people benefit from such programs. Of course, trillions of dollars in government expenditures over many years most assuredly benefit the recipients of subsidies or other related payments. But this does not change the arithmetic. The eventual collapse of a colossal government venture will indiscriminately engulf an entire society and economy, including its millions of beneficiaries and benefactors, resulting in widespread disorder and misery.
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Mark R. Levin (Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future)
“
At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.
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Peter Singer (Practical Ethics)
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When using this technique, it’s important to refrain from projecting bias onto the subject of your concentration. If you choose to focus your attention on a person, don’t rush to judge that person as being good or bad. In many ways, the concepts of good and bad are just tools that our self-centered minds use to sort through sensory data. For example, a controlled fire at a comfortable distance feels warm, so your brain thinks that’s good. An uncontrolled fire that’s burning your hand hurts, so that’s bad. It’s the effect the fire has on you that makes your brain think it’s good or bad, not the simple fact that it’s a fire. Non-judgmental concentration trains your brain to realize that the people and things in your life don’t exist relative to you; they simply exist. If you can take yourself out of the equation, you’ll have a much clearer view. Uncluttered by judgmentalism, you can work more efficiently, because you won’t be as distracted, and you can think more objectively, too.
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Brad Jacobs (How to Make a Few Billion Dollars)
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She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.” “So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began. “I promise you, they are,” Marvel said. Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.” Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.
”
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John Sandford (Silken Prey (Lucas Davenport #23))
“
In my early years the psychology of the 1960s U.S. was aspirational and inspirational—to achieve great and noble goals. It was like nothing I have seen since. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy, an intelligent, charismatic man who painted vivid pictures of changing the world for the better—exploring outer space, achieving equal rights, and eliminating poverty. He and his ideas had a major effect on my thinking. The United States was then at its peak relative to the rest of the world, accounting for 40 percent of its economy compared to about 20 percent today; the dollar was the world’s currency; and the U.S. was the dominant military power. Being “liberal” meant being committed to moving forward in a fast and fair way, while being “conservative” meant being stuck in old and unfair ways—at least that’s how it seemed to me and to most of the people around me. As we saw it, the U.S. was rich, progressive, well managed, and on a mission to improve quickly at everything. I might have been naive but I wasn’t alone.
”
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.
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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
“
The Costs of War Project at Brown University reports that over 6,800 US troops have died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In addition, the Costs of War Project says at least 6,780 US contractors, rarely counted, should be included in the American death toll. Suicides by American veterans number into the thousands and are not counted in battle-related deaths. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens have died as well. Total dollar costs for the wars will exceed $4 trillion. I predict it will cost even more since the total tally won’t be in for decades. And it’s not over yet. Even in 2013 we still had over 100,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. And we’re not about to close down the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad. There are no plans to actually leave either country. Yet there are plenty of plans to maintain and to expand our presence worldwide as we deal with Syria, Lebanon, Iran, or wherever our US Empire chooses. Killing hundreds of thousands of the so-called enemy makes no sense given that most of them had no involvement in 9/11. This is pure bloodlust.
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Ron Paul (Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity)
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After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1. Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.
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William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
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The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.
”
”
Theodore Dreiser
“
In relation to “Killing Me Softly,” I was surely a poseur, the kind of coward to whom crossover albums were marketed or, worse yet, someone co-opting someone else’s bad experience. And yet, now, in the Tower Records, I understood that there was a sense in which “Killing Me Softly” was just a song—it itself wasn’t the cursive font in which the titles were printed, which made me think of a tattoo, and caused me to feel sheltered and useless. I ended up buying the cassette single, because it was only two dollars, and because it seemed more honest about just being into the most popular song on the album.
”
”
Elif Batuman (Either/Or)
“
There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.
”
”
Xóchitl González (Olga Dies Dreaming)
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Poor is relative, of course. None of you were rich or had any dreams of being rich or even knew anyone rich. But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident. Bad day at work and/or kid has a fever and/or miss the bus and consequently ten minutes late to the audition which equals you don’t get to play the part of Background Oriental with Downtrodden Face. Which equals, stretch the dollar that week, boil chicken bones twice for a watery soup, make the bottom of the bag of rice last another dinner or three.
”
”
Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
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What is America to do about the rising tide of horror? Visitors from Europe or Japan shake their heads in wonder at the squalor and barbarity of America’s cities. They could be forgiven for thinking that the country had viciously and deliberately neglected its poor and its blacks. Of course, it has not. Since the 1960s, the United States has poured a staggering amount of money into education, housing, welfare, Medicaid, and uplift programs of every kind. Government now spends $240 billion a year to fight poverty,1278 and despite the widespread notion that spending was curtailed during Republican administrations, it has actually gone up steadily, at a rate that would have astonished the architects of the Great Society. Federal spending on the poor, in real 1989 dollars, quadrupled from 1965 to 1975, and has nearly doubled since then.1279 As the economist Walter Williams has pointed out, with all the money spent on poverty since the 1960s, the government could have bought every company on the Fortune 500 list and nearly all the farmland in America.1280 What do we have to show for three decades and $2.5 trillion worth of war on poverty? The truth is that these programs have not worked. The truth that America refuses to see is that these programs have made things worse.
”
”
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
“
Although it would be difficult to prove, the pervading view of wealth—that it should be forcibly taken from those who have it—probably has an effect on crime. If, as they are told over and over, the poor are entitled to money earned by others, why should they not simply take it themselves and cut out the middleman? Crime is, in fact, a much more efficient way to spread wealth. Of every dollar spent by Congress for welfare, only thirty cents actually reach recipients. Administration and bureaucrat salaries eat up the rest.1318 New York City spends an incredible $18,000 a year per person to accommodate drifters on cots laid out by the hundreds on the floors of armories.
”
”
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
“
He looked for commitment, to the cause and not just to their own success. Team First! You need to find... people who put the company first...
But how do you know when you have found such a person? Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else's success. Sundar notes that "sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex [pay a lot of attention to] on those signals when people give something up. Also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn't related to them but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team p117-18
”
”
Eric Schmidt (Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell)
“
I’ve tackled many challenges in my lifetime. The most satisfying ones were food related. Like the 2-pound burger at Fuddruckers that I had to devour in 15 minutes. Shattered it in 5 minutes and 46 seconds! Or
the Blazing Challenge at Buffalo Wild Wings: eat 12 blazing wings in 5 minutes. Killed it in 57 seconds! Quaker Steak and Lube’s all-you-can- eat wings in one sitting? I may still hold the record in Madison, Wisconsin, for scarfing down 78. I’ll never forget when 6 linemen and I went to a sushi restaurant during the time of the 2011 Rose Bowl in Pasadena. We didn’t exactly take on an eating challenge, but we did get kicked out of the place when the owner ordered, “Go home now.
You’ve eaten eight hundred dollars’ worth of sushi.
”
”
Jake Byrne (First and Goal: What Football Taught Me About Never Giving Up)
“
Although 'debtor's prison' is illegal in all states, many states use the threat of probation or parole revocation as a debt-collection tool. In fact, in some jurisdictions, individuals may 'choose' to go to jail as a way to reduce their debt burdens, a practice that has been challenged as unconstitutional. Adding to the insanity, many states suspend driving privileges for missed debt payments, a practice that often causes people to lose employment (if they had it) and creates yet another opportunity for jail time: driving with a suspended license. In this regime, many people are thrown back in prison simply because they have been unable - with no place to live, and no decent job - to pay back thousands of dollars of prison-related fees, fines, and child support.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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It is also a message to Congress and the presidency—slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice. The funds used to sustain bureaucracies such as the DEA that prosecute the war on drugs are a drop in the ocean when compared with the gazillions that organized crime syndicates have earned because Washington is determined to drive the market underground. The social and criminal problems related to drug abuse will never go away until the state can exercise control over the industry as a whole.
”
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Misha Glenny (McMafia)
“
Star Wars was a total piece of shit that had spawned billions of dollars in merchandise and sequels and books and games and pajama bottoms. It was an infinite reservoir, it was an endless void. It was responsible for a cornucopia of made up words like Jedi, the Force and lightsaber.
A lightsaber was a sword made of light. A sword was a weapon used to murder people.
A Jedi was a knight who believed in an idea of relative good and performed supernatural feats using the Force. A Jedi used supernatural feats and his lightsaber to murder people with opposing ideas of relative good.
The Force was an ill-explained mystical energy which ran throughout the fictional universe of Star Wars. It was a device which allowed characters to perform supernatural feats whenever a lull was created by poor writing in the screenplay.
As might be imagined, the Force was used with great frequency.
”
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Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
“
But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen.
”
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
“
For the laborers as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
“
In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Since I saw them pictures a while back on the front page of The New York Times of that police dog in Birmingham biting a young black student in the stomach, I have ceased to like white folks," said Simple.
"As bad as Birmingham is," I said, "surely you do not blame white people in New York or Detroit or San Francisco for that Alabama dog."
"I do," said Simple, "because white folks is in the majority every-where. They control the government in Washington, and if they let such doings go on in this American country, such as has been going on in Alabama and Mississippi, I blame them all. If white folks was bit by police dogs and prodded with electric rods, you can bet your bottom dollar something would be done about it—and quick—before you could say Jackie Robinson."
"You are no doubt right," I said, "but as long as they themselves are not bitten by dogs and prodded by electric rods and denied the right to march or to vote, most white folks in the North will do very little to help Southern Negroes."
"And I will do very little toward loving them," said Simple.
”
”
Langston Hughes (The Return of Simple)
“
ten thousand talents. It is hard to estimate exactly what that was worth, and it may in fact only mean the largest debt conceivable, “ten thousand” being one of the largest common numbers and a “talent” being the largest denomination of currency. However, if we do estimate it in dollars, we derive some interesting results. A talent was seventy-five pounds, so ten thousand talents would be 750,000 pounds. We do not know whether they were talents of gold or silver. But since Jesus is trying to exaggerate the contrast between this great debt and the relatively small debt of verse 28, we may suppose that He was thinking of the greater of the two talents, namely, gold. In troy weight there are twelve ounces to a pound. So we are now dealing with 750,000 times 12, or 9 million ounces of gold. Assuming that gold is selling at about $400 an ounce, we come to a figure of $3,600 million (three trillion six hundred million dollars). That is beyond our comprehension, which is precisely Christ’s point. It is an astronomical debt, entirely beyond this servant’s or anybody else’s capacity to pay.
”
”
James Montgomery Boice (The Parables of Jesus)
“
In every generation, the embrace of Calvinism by a faction of students and faculty placed schools and administrators in a difficult position. Since the 1920s, Calvinism had acquired a reputation among fundamentalist institutions of higher education as both compelling and disruptive. Calvinists often demanded greater theological consistency than school leaders wanted to endorse. And they sometimes disparaged important elements of American evangelicalism, including the emotional revivalism and dispensational Bible-reading methods beloved by so many evangelicals. In addition, school administrators remained painfully aware of the fact that their interdenominational schools needed to remain friendly to a relatively wide variety of denominational backgrounds. The big tent of American evangelicalism often included groups that considered Calvinism a foreign imposition. As in all things, school administrators balked at the idea of embracing any idea that would drive away students and their tuition dollars. In effect, Calvinism served as a perennial reminder of the unresolvable tension in fundamentalist and evangelical institutions between the demands of theological purity, interdenominational viability, and institutional pragmatism.
”
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Adam Laats (Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education)
“
A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.
”
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Danielle Evans (The Office of Historical Corrections)
“
How do you commit the perfect crime in science? We’re handicapped from the start because it’s a question we never ask. For more than thirty years, Frank taught me and many others to record our data accurately, compare them with collaborators around the world, discard the outliers, and come to a consensus. We understand there are variations, but if the bulk of the evidence goes in a certain direction, we are confident we have a better understanding of human biological processes. If only that were what happened in the real world. In the real world there are corporations, be they pharmaceutical, agricultural, petroleum, or chemical companies, that have billions of dollars at stake in the work of scientists. If one has billions of dollars, he can use the dark arts of persuasion to hire public relations firms to tout your products, sow the seeds of doubt about those who question your products, buy advertising on news networks so they don’t publicize negative stories unless they have no other choice, and donate to politicians of all ideologies. Then, once those politicians have been elected, they can write laws for the benefit of their generous donors. As it was put so eloquently in the seventeenth century by a prominent member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, “If it prospers, none dare call it treason.
”
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Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
“
BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?
”
”
Paul Kent (Playing with Purpose: Baseball Devotions: 180 Spiritual Truths Drawn from the Great Game of Baseball)
“
She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm.
So much for the natural relation between the sexes.
But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life.
They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.
”
”
Marilyn French (The Women's Room)
“
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The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism.
It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement.
The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions.
By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity.
I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it.
Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege.
But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum.
While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers.
These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant.
So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change.
If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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The first cut at the problem—the simplest but still eye-opening—is to ask how much income would have to be transferred from rich countries to poor countries to lift all of the world’s extreme poor to an income level sufficient to meet basic needs. Martin Ravallion and his colleagues on the World Bank’s poverty team have gathered data to address this question, at least approximately. The World Bank estimates that meeting basic needs requires $1.08 per day per person, measured in 1993 purchasing-power adjusted prices. Using household surveys, the Ravallion team has calculated the numbers of poor people around the world who live below that threshold, and the average incomes of those poor. According to the Bank’s estimates, 1.1 billion people lived below the $1.08 level as of 2001, with an average income of $0.77 per day, or $281 per year. More important, the poor had a shortfall relative to basic needs of $0.31 per day ($1.08 minus $0.77), or $113 per year. Worldwide, the total income shortfall of the poor in 2001 was therefore $113 per year per person multiplied by 1.1 billion people, or $124 billion. Using the same accounting units (1993 purchasing power adjusted U.S. dollars), the income of the twenty-two donor countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2001 was $20.2 trillion. Thus a transfer of 0.6 percent of donor income, amounting to $124 billion, would in theory raise all 1.1 billion of the world’s extreme poor to the basic-needs level. Notably, this transfer could be accomplished within the 0.7 percent of the GNP target of the donor countries. That transfer would not have been possible in 1980, when the numbers of the extreme poor were larger (1.5 billion) and the incomes of the rich countries considerably smaller. Back in 1981, the total income gap was around $208 billion (again, measured in 1993 purchasing power prices) and the combined donor country GNP was $13.2 trillion. Then it would have required 1.6 percent of donor income in transfers to raise the extreme poor to the basic-needs level.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs (The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime)
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It occurred to me, not for the first time, how much simpler our lives would be if we could date each other. That delousing kit cost eleven dollars! “Do you ever think it would be easier if we could go out with girls?” I said aloud. Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I find most of the lesbians I know a bit intimidating,” she said, finally. “And I don’t really share their aesthetic sense—or they seem not to value aesthetics that much. I just don’t think I’d fit in. Especially since I’m always lusting after boys.” That was something I thought about, too: the physical response I felt to Ivan, the dull electric jolt, some heavy, slow machinery starting to turn in my chest and between my legs. I had never felt those things with relation to a girl. On the other hand, I usually hadn’t felt them in Ivan’s presence, either; it was more when he wasn’t there. And how much was that physical feeling worth? Was it really enough to counterbalance all the disadvantages? You couldn’t just talk to Ivan like he was a normal person; he didn’t hear, or he didn’t understand, or he went off somewhere and you couldn’t find him. Also, all his friends thought I was crazy. Instead of dealing with those people, how much more fun and relaxing it would be to pet Svetlana’s shining golden hair, to tell her how pretty she was and to watch her get more pretty, as she always did when someone complimented her. Her body wanted to be complimented, and I knew just what to tell her, so why couldn’t I? “But girls are more beautiful, and so much easier to sort of negotiate with. And the lust for boys never seems to work out well for me. So it just feels like girls are at least something to think about.” Again, Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I would feel squeamish with anything beyond kissing and playing with each other’s breasts,” she said after a moment. I realized that I, too, had only been thinking about kissing and playing with each other’s breasts. What else did lesbians even do? Other than oral sex, which was apparently horrible. The way people talked about it on sit-coms: “Does he like . . . deep-sea diving?” You had to be altruistic to do it—a generous lover. That said, oral sex with a boy also seemed likely to be disgusting. Guys themselves seemed to think so. Wasn’t that why they went around yelling “cocksucker” at people who cut them off in traffic? “Do you not feel squeamish when you think about sex with a guy?” I asked. “I do, but it feels exciting. The idea of being penetrated and dominated.
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Elif Batuman (Either/Or)
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Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4
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Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
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In the 1860s, during its civil war, the US suspended gold convertibility and printed paper money (known as “greenbacks”) to help monetize war debts. Around the time the US returned to its gold peg in the mid-1870s, a number of other countries joined the gold standard; most currencies remained fixed against it until World War I. Major exceptions were Japan (which was on a silver-linked standard until the 1890s, which led its exchange rate to devalue against gold as silver prices fell during this period) and Spain, which frequently suspended convertibility to support large fiscal deficits. During World War I, warring countries ran enormous deficits that were funded by central banks’ printing and lending of money. Gold served as money in foreign transactions, as international trust (and hence credit) was lacking. When the war ended, a new monetary order was created with gold and the winning countries’ currencies, which were tied to gold. Still, between 1919 and 1922 several European countries, especially those that lost the war, were forced to print and devalue their currencies. The German mark and German mark debt sank between 1920 and 1923. Some of the winners of the war also had debts that had to be devalued to create a new start. With debt, domestic political, and international geopolitical restructurings done, the 1920s boomed, particularly in the US, inflating a debt bubble. The debt bubble burst in 1929, requiring central banks to print money and devalue it throughout the 1930s. More money printing and more money devaluations were required during World War II to fund military spending. In 1944–45, as the war ended, a new monetary system that linked the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar was created. The currencies and debts of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as those of China and a number of other countries, were quickly and totally destroyed, while those of most winners of the war were slowly but still substantially depreciated. This monetary system stayed in place until the late 1960s. In 1968–73 (most importantly in 1971), excessive spending and debt creation (especially by the US) required breaking the dollar’s link to gold because the claims on gold that were being turned in were far greater than the amount of gold available to redeem them. That led to a dollar-based fiat monetary system, which allowed the big increase in dollar-denominated money and credit that fueled the inflation of the 1970s and led to the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since 2000, the value of money has fallen in relation to the value of gold due to money and credit creation and because interest rates have been low in relation to inflation rates. Because the monetary system has been free-floating, it hasn’t experienced the abrupt breaks it did in the past; the devaluation has been more gradual and continuous. Low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have not provided compensation for the increasing amount of money and credit and the resulting (albeit low) inflation.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together.
Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do.
In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other.
So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships?
I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves.
When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems.
I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart.
Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond?
When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers.
In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.
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Corin
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”
”
Glenn Eichler
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By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement.
During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk.
For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe.
The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became.
Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations.
Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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On Mr. Phipps' discovering the place of my concealment, he cocked his gun and aimed at me. I requested him not to shoot and I would give up, upon which he demanded my sword. I delivered it to him, and he brought me to prison. During the time I was pursued, I had many hair breadth escapes, which your time will not permit you to relate. I am here loaded with chains, and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me.
I here proceeded to make some inquiries of him after assuring him of the certain death that awaited him, and that concealment would only bring destruction on the innocent as well as guilty, of his own color, if he knew of any extensive or concerted plan. His answer was, I do not. When I questioned him as to the insurrection in North Carolina happening about the same time, he denied any knowledge of it; and when I looked him in the face as though I would search his inmost thoughts, he replied, 'I see sir, you doubt my word; but can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heaven's might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking.' I now had much conversation with and asked him many questions, having forborne to do so previously, except in the cases noted in parenthesis; but during his statement, I had, unnoticed by him, taken notes as to some particular circumstances, and having the advantage of his statement before me in writing, on the evening of the third day that I had been with him, I began a cross examination, and found his statement corroborated by every circumstance coming within my own knowledge or the confessions of others whom had been either killed or executed, and whom he had not seen nor had any knowledge since 22d of August last, he expressed himself fully satisfied as to the impracticability of his attempt. It has been said he was ignorant and cowardly, and that his object was to murder and rob for the purpose of obtaining money to make his escape. It is notorious, that he was never known to have a dollar in his life; to swear an oath, or drink a drop of spirits. As to his ignorance, he certainly never had the advantages of education, but he can read and write, (it was taught him by his parents,) and for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, is surpassed by few men I have ever seen. As to his being a coward, his reason as given for not resisting Mr. Phipps, shews the decision of his character. When he saw Mr. Phipps present his gun, he said he knew it was impossible for him to escape as the woods were full of men; he therefore thought it was better to surrender, and trust to fortune for his escape. He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably. On other subjects he possesses an uncommon share of intelligence, with a mind capable of attaining any thing; but warped and perverted by the influence of early impressions. He is below the ordinary stature, though strong and active, having the true negro face, every feature of which is strongly marked. I shall not attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented on by himself, in the condemned hole of the prison. The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with chains; yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.
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Nat Turner (The Confessions of Nat Turner)
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The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it.
And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it.
However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid).
Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment.
So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions.
So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
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Gabor Maté
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sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex on those signals when people give something up.fn3 And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn’t related to them, but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team, like Steph Curry jumping up and down when Kevin Durant hits a big shot. You can’t fake that.”fn4
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Eric Schmidt (Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell)
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The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding. Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent crime. As a result, when Jackson County, Wisconsin, quadrupled its drug arrests between 1999 and 2000, the county’s federal subsidy quadrupled too.46
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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whenever activists—especially black activists—challenged discriminatory or abusive policing or questioned state and federal budgets that shifted billions of dollars away from education, public housing, welfare, or drug treatment to brand-new, high-tech prisons, someone would inevitably interrupt the conversation to raise the subject of violent crime—especially “black-on-black crime.” This discursive maneuver was often performed casually in an offhand manner; yet it proved to be a stunningly effective way of refocusing attention on a relatively small number of individuals who cause harm, thus shielding from critique an entire system that inflicts incalculable harm on millions.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Yes! I reminded my buyer this was an off-market deal. She was getting in early, and P.S. her daughter had been searching for an apartment for four years! Wouldn’t she like to see her happily settled? She agreed to come up $250,000 for “a quick sale.” Just like that, the million-mile distance was slashed in half. I know I’m talking about big numbers here, but what you should understand is that I’m making the gap relative. Whether you’re trying to close a million-dollar gap or a $10 one, break it down. I basically asked each side to come up, relatively speaking, $2.50. That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as bridging a million-dollar gap, now does it?
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Ryan Serhant (Sell It Like Serhant: How to Sell More, Earn More, and Become the Ultimate Sales Machine)
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Endiro Giansante, owner of Fawn Street Florists, descended from the store's attic where he was drying pink larkspur to find his new deliveryman, Ludis Lanka, standing near the register holding two ten-dollar bills upright in his hand.
"A man came in, you were upstairs, so I took the order," he beamed proudly.
"Ludis, you're a nice fellow but you're never to deal with a customer. Unless they're Latvian," he added with a smile, "in which case I'd ask you to translate."
By way of confession, Ludis added, "He gave me a two-dollar tip, and reached to his pocket as if he might have to split it with Endiro.
"No, keep the two dollars, but you're a delivery boy, not a salesman. Delivery man," he corrected himself, for Ludis was surely in his twenties or early thirties. He'd only been working there a few days, answering a sign in the window. God knows how the sweet fellow would survive on what he paid him, thought Endiro. He must surely live with relatives.
"Es biju citur," said Ludis, which means "I was elsewhere." Not quite apropos but it was the first Latvian phrase Cliff had learned at McMasters and he'd been told he'd pronounced it well.
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Rupert Holmes (Murder Your Employer (The McMasters Guide to Homicide, #1))
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But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen. Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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In science-related startups, the story is a little different. On average, 75 percent of founders in healthcare, life sciences, and biotech had directly relevant experience, while in enterprise tech only 40 percent and in consumer only 30 percent had directly relevant experience.
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Ali Tamaseb (Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups)
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Conservative media outlets portrayed climate change as a job-killing hoax hatched by tree-hugging extremists. Big Oil funneled millions of dollars into a web of think tanks and public relations firms committed to obscuring the facts about climate change.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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McCall was reelected seven times, that is, until 1972, when Florida Governor Reubin Askew stepped in and suspended him after yet another violent assault on someone in his custody. This time, McCall was indicted for second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death. The prisoner was in jail for a twenty-six-dollar traffic ticket. McCall was acquitted. But he lost the election that November. Blacks were now able to vote, and they turned out in force to defeat him the first chance they got. “We sent cars out and taxicabs,” Viola Dunham, a longtime resident and a sister-in-law of George Starling, remembered. “We started getting these people out to vote.” Then, too, a new generation of whites had entered the Florida electorate, the younger people who may have identified with the young freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama even if they would not have participated themselves, and the snowbirds, the white northerners who were buying up vacation homes or retiring to central Florida with the boom that came with the arrival of Disney World and who couldn’t relate to the heavy-handedness of a small-town southern sheriff. And now it seemed that even the most steadfast traditionalists had finally tired of the controversies and felt it was time for him to go. The defeated sheriff retreated to his ranch on Willis V. McCall Road in Eustis, where he tended his citrus grove, welcomed his partisans, and held forth on his decades of lordship over Lake County. He could take comfort in the fact that, for better or for worse, Lake County would not soon forget him, and he took pride in his role of protecting southern tradition.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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the Times reported that police departments had an extraordinary incentive to use their new equipment for drug enforcement: the extra federal funding the local police departments received was tied to antidrug policing. The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding. Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent crime.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Though it runs to billions of dollars a year, the cost of forcing healthy adults to wear disposable surgical masks will be relatively minor for wealthy countries. And cloth masks are easy to clean in places that have access to clean water. In poor countries the calculus is different. Making people wear cloth masks that cannot be easily cleaned or spend a significant part of their income on disposable ones is much harder to justify if masks don’t work.
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Alex Berenson (Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 3: Masks)
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Women under 30 who don’t have children have closed the pay gap with their male counterparts. Once women have kids, they go to 77 cents on the dollar relative to their male counterparts. Part of our ability to create the same career trajectory for women with kids is to create more options and flexibility around where they work from. Part of working from home is the ability to work at different hours than the rest of your team, allowing for family needs like caretaking, side gigs, or hobbies that contribute to a work-life balance. It may be time to unroll the yoga mat or dust off the drum set in the garage, instead of spending 225 hours, or 9 full days, a year commuting.
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Scott Galloway (Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity)
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are constantly taking transient experiences, cramming them into prearranged slots, turning discontinuity into continuity, and making solid what is actually fluid. The technical term for what’s happening is reification—giving immaterial experiences “thingness.” So convincing is this transformation that rocks seem solid and heavy when, in fact, your mind reified them—you have created solidity and heaviness in your own awareness. This constitutes another outrageous conclusion to anyone who is out to reinforce and reaffirm the spell/dream/illusion. But you cannot thaw out the “thingness” of the physical world unless you break down the process that created it. I’m hesitant to use any kind of jargon, but we need to delve into how reification works. The dictionary definition of reify is “to make something more concrete or real.” The mental image of money gets reified into a dollar bill, which you can fold up and stick in your wallet. “Parenting” gets reified when you decide to have a baby you can hold in your arms. What’s earthshaking is that virtual reality owes its existence entirely to reification. The web of connections that entangles everything in the spell/dream/ illusion with everything else comes down to the mind, because connections are mind-made. No object is actually a physical thing, pure and simple. “Object” and “thing” and “physical” are strands of a mental web. People find it relatively easy to accept that a piece of paper currency is the reified form of a concept (money), but they balk when they are told that the same is true of body, brain, and universe. The key is to
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Deepak Chopra (Metahuman: Unleashing your infinite potential)
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Money is a tool, but it’s also a symbol. It’s sort of like the luxury wine sector, which is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry even though many people can’t taste the difference between low- and high-quality, cheap and expensive, red and white wines. As Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, tweeted, “Wine seems to just be a well-studied microcosm of how human beliefs and desires work more generally. Namely, that they’re socially mediated, easily falsified, unconsciously influenced by cues of status and distinction, and relatively impervious to rational self-reflection.
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Kyla Scanlon (In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work)
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Now, we live under the tyranny of a New World Order—a world that has been reordered by a small group of wealthy financiers and industrialists centered within secret societies such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg group. Also,
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Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
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Now, we live under the tyranny of a New World Order—a world that has been reordered by a small group of wealthy financiers and industrialists centered within secret societies such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg group.
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Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
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Nick Rockefeller, a participant in the World Economic Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, may have revealed the agenda of the New World Order in a casual comment. According to the late Hollywood producer Aaron Russo, Rockefeller told him, “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.
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Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
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If the anti-vaxxers are conspiracy nuts, which they sure are, so are the politicians, who keep dumping billions and billions of dollars in defense contracts out of sheer primitive insecurity instead of working to organize peace.
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Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
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during an eye-opening day in Berlin dedicated to sex-related investment opportunities. Bauer had been open about Wirecard’s business, that it processed some porn, but that the bulk of its profits came from gaming. Marques started to short Wirecard stock on the basis that it was lying, heavily involved in gaming, and the US authorities were likely to crack down.
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Dan McCrum (Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth)
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You also only have two friends, and they’re both fake accounts.” “They told me I had funds available in a deceased relative’s account that they would help me retrieve. It sounded promising.” A sharp laugh hits me. “You didn’t even accept my friend request.” “You weren’t offering me two million dollars.
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Jennifer Hartmann (Lotus: Second Chance Love with Romantic Suspense)
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Charles Schwab was paid a salary of a million dollars a year in the steel business, and he told me that he was paid this huge salary largely because of his ability to handle people. Imagine that! A million dollars a year because he was able to handle people! One day at noontime, Schwab was walking through one of his steel mills when he came across a group of men smoking directly under a sign that said No Smoking. Do you suppose that Charles Schwab pointed at the sign and said, “Can’t you read?” Absolutely not, not that master of human relations. Mr. Schwab chatted with the men in a friendly way and never said a word about the fact that they were smoking under a No Smoking sign. Finally he handed them some cigars and said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d appreciate it, boys, if you’d smoke these outside.” That is all he said. Those men knew that he knew that they had broken a rule, and they admired him because he hadn’t called them down. He had been such a good sport with them that they in turn wanted to be good sports with him. —DALE CARNEGIE
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Dale Carnegie (The Leader In You: How to Win Friends, Influence People & Succeed in a Changing World (Dale Carnegie Books))
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It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve eaten with porcine abandon. Your bloodstream is teeming with amino acids, fatty acids, glucose. It’s far more than you need to power you over to the couch in a postprandial daze. What does your body do with the excess? This is crucial to understand because, basically, the process gets reversed when you’re later sprinting for your life. To answer this question, it’s time we talked finances, the works—savings accounts, change for a dollar, stocks and bonds, negative amortization of interest rates, shaking coins out of piggy banks—because the process of transporting energy through the body bears some striking similarities to the movement of money. It is rare today for the grotesquely wealthy to walk around with their fortunes in their pockets, or to hoard their wealth as cash stuffed inside mattresses. Instead, surplus wealth is stored elsewhere, in forms more complex than cash: mutual funds, tax-free government bonds, Swiss bank accounts. In the same way, surplus energy is not kept in the body’s form of cash—circulating amino acids, glucose, and fatty acids—but stored in more complex forms. Enzymes in fat cells can combine fatty acids and glycerol to form triglycerides (table). Accumulate enough of these in the fat cells and you grow plump. Meanwhile, your cells can stick series of glucose molecules together. These long chains, sometimes thousands of glucose molecules long, are called glycogen. Most glycogen formation occurs in your muscles and liver. Similarly, enzymes in cells throughout the body can combine long strings of amino acids, forming them into proteins. The hormone that stimulates the transport and storage of these building blocks into target cells is insulin. Insulin is this optimistic hormone that plans for your metabolic future. Eat
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
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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)