“
If we choose to be free and accountable for creating our own ideals and meaning in life, we must accept that with this freedom comes the burden of responsibility. We must ensure that our actions reflect the values we choose to uphold. ( "Lost the Global Story." )
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Erik Pevernagie
“
Let my assure you, Brethren, that some day you will have a personal Priesthood interview with the Savior, Himself. If you are interested, I will tell you the order in which He will ask you to account for your earthly responsibilities.
First, He will request an accountability report about your relationship with your wife. Have you actively been engaged in making her happy and ensuring that her needs have been met as an individual?
Second, He will want an accountability report about each of your children individually. He will not attempt to have this for simply a family stewardship but will request information about your relationship to each and every child.
Third, He will want to know what you personally have done with the talents you were given in the pre-existence.
Fourth, He will want a summary of your activity in your church assignments. He will not be necessarily interested in what assignments you have had, for in his eyes the home teacher and a mission president are probably equals, but He will request a summary of how you have been of service to your fellowmen in your Church assignments.
Fifth, He will have no interest in how you earned your living, but if you were honest in all your dealings.
Sixth, He will ask for an accountability on what you have done to contribute in a positive manner to your community, state, country, and the world.
”
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David O. McKay
“
It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it.
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Bruce H. Norton (Force Recon Diary, 1969: The Riveting, True-to-Life Account of Survival and Death in One of the Most Highly Skilled Units in Vietnam)
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Responsibility: It was my fault that my purse was stolen. Accountability: In the future, I will take precautions to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
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M.J. DeMarco (The Millionaire Fastlane)
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You only ever have three things: 1) your self, wellbeing and mindset 2) Your life network, resources and resourcefulness 3) Your reputation and goodwill. Treasure and tend the first. Value, support and build the second. And mindfully, wisely ensure that the third (your life current and savings account) is always in credit.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
“
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it — who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: “One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.” Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this is how it works.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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Board of Directors members should hold management accountable for performance and ensure the company is operating ethically and responsibly.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Companies should manage tax liabilities strategically to optimize financial resources, enhance profitability, and ensure compliance with tax laws. Effective tax management reduces the tax burden and allows companies to allocate more resources to core activities, ultimately improving their bottom line.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Any ideology built around a notion of destiny—nationalism and socialism alike—runs the risk of calamity. The solution is a banal one: valuing and protecting rights and liberties, while ensuring that ordinary people are not only consulted through mass rallies but actually have democratic avenues to make choices and hold their leaders accountable. Without this bedrock, any postcapitalist society risks creating a new caste of oppressors.
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Bhaskar Sunkara (The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality)
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By connecting Oswald to several parts of the JFK–Almeida coup plan, those working for Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli could ensure that when Oswald surfaced as the main suspect, the CIA and other agencies would have to cover up much information to protect the coup plan—which is exactly what happened
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Lamar Waldron (The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination: the definitive account of the most controversial crime of the twentieth century)
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That part of warcraft always appealed to me. Such things happen slowly . . . and then all at once. The ground must be carefully prepared, often for generations. Corporations had been chipping away at the authority of governments for a century before the Seed Wars. They experimented with company towns, and then outrageous benefits for employees. As health care became more expensive, one didn’t even have to offer private transport and free meals. Simply helping pay the cost to cure grandma’s cancer was enough to ensure blind obedience. That’s how you keep them loyal. Foster distrust in the democratic governments that are actually accountable to them.
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Kameron Hurley (The Light Brigade)
“
Strategic tax management also enhances a company's competitiveness by enabling them to make informed financial decisions, attract investors, and adapt to changing tax regulations. It helps in minimizing financial risk and ensuring that the company's financial health remains strong, fostering long-term sustainability and growth.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Trying something different won't ensure that you would be liked by everyone. Still.. Go on..
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Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 Golden Steps of Life)
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Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.
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Ram Charan (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done)
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Though somewhat deaf upon ordinary occasions, her ear for bad news was as sharp as a kite’s scent for carrion; for Dorothy, otherwise an industrious, faithful, and even affectionate creature, had that strong appetite for collecting and retailing sinister intelligence which is often to be marked in the lower classes. Little accustomed to be listened to, they love the attention which a tragic tale ensures to the bearer, and enjoy, perhaps, the temporary equality to which misfortune reduces those who are ordinarily accounted their superiors. Dorothy
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Walter Scott (The Complete Novels of Sir Walter Scott: Waverly, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, The Pirate, Old Mortality, The Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian and many more (Illustrated))
“
As for relegated/delegated responsibility to ensure organizational software licensing compliance, management is still accountable when intellectual property rights are violated. If the safeguarding responsibility is assigned to an ineffective and/or inefficient unit within an organization, IT audit should recommend an alternative arrangement after the risks are substantiated.
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Robert E. Davis
“
Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
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Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person’s unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person’s exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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I believe leading an organization is one of the greatest honors and challenges that any individual can assume. But it’s not a job for everyone. And there is only one way to ensure that you have what it takes to be a truly accountable leader—you have to make a conscious decision to lead, with full awareness of what that means.
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Vince Molinaro (The Leadership Contract - The Fine Print to Becoming an Accountable Leader)
“
Each system may have a specific purpose but it links with others to achieve a common goal. Systems ensure a solid working approach across the board to make sure your company runs as efficiently as possible. Typical systems include operations, product development, billing and accounting, customer service, marketing, HR, and resource management.
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Andrea Plos (Sources of Wealth)
“
Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.
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John Pavlovitz (A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community)
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At the heart of the concept of the rule of law is the idea that society is governed by law. Parliament exists primarily in order to make laws for society in this country. Democratic procedures exist primarily in order to ensure that the Parliament which makes those laws includes Members of Parliament who are chosen by the people of this country and are accountable to them. Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. That role includes ensuring that the executive branch of government carries out its functions in accordance with the law. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other.
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The Secret Barrister (Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies)
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The Dalai Lama’s Principles for Ethical Strategies3 Ensure that compassion is the motivation. Any problem must take into account the big picture and long-term consequences rather than short-term feasibility. In applying reason, we must stay honest, unbiased, and self-aware, vigilant to avoid self-delusion. Stay humble—know the limits of our knowledge and also realize we can easily be misguided in a rapidly changing reality. The foremost concern is the well-being of humanity and the planet we inhabit.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Extremism will generate both positive and negative reactions, or “engagements.” Facebook measures engagement by the number of clicks, “likes,” shares, and comments. This design feature—or flaw, if you care about the quality of knowledge and debate—ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest. Sober, measured accounts of the world have no chance on Facebook. And when Facebook dominates our sense of the world and our social circles, we all potentially become carriers of extremist nonsense
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Siva Vaidhyanathan (Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy)
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Therapy entails the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent the “inhabitants” of a given universe from “emigrating.” It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual “cases.” Since, as we have seen, every society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomenon. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psychoanalysis, from pastoral care to personnel counseling programs, belong, of course, under the category of social control. What interests us here, however, is the conceptual aspect of therapy. Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the “official” definitions of reality, it must develop a conceptual machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that includes a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the “cure of souls.
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Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
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Captain Marquet came to understand that the role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. If the captain provides direction and protection, the crew will do what needs to be done to advance the mission.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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But Welch's approach benefited GE because it made each unit accountable and did away with inefficiencies. The business rules across the company were: be number one or two in a market or get out, and generate high returns on investments. If a business unit failed in either of these areas, it was sold. Welch's method ensured that each unit was being run profitably, while allowing unit heads significant flexibility and independence. The plan worked. GE's market value skyrocketed. Valued at $12 billion in 1981, it was valued at $375 billion twenty-five years later.
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Ori Brafman (The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations)
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CHECK IN OFTEN TO ENSURE MEANINGFUL PROGRESS The Nonessentialist leader is not great on accountability. A primary and somewhat obvious reason is that the more items one pursues, the harder it is to follow up on all of them. In fact, a Nonessentialist leader may unintentionally train his people to expect no follow-up at all. In turn, the members of the team soon learn that there are no repercussions for failing, cutting corners, or prioritizing what is easy over what is important. They learn that each objective pronounced by the leader will be emphasized only for a moment before giving way to something else of momentary interest.
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
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Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
I have spoken of reinventing marriage, of marriages achieving their rebirth in the middle age of the partners. This phenomenon has been called the 'comedy of remarriage' by Stanley Cavell, whose Pursuits of Happiness, a film book, is perhaps the best marriage manual ever published. One must, however, translate his formulation from the language of Hollywood, in which he developed it, into the language of middle age: less glamour, less supple youth, less fantasyland. Cavell writes specifically of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s in which couples -- one partner is often the dazzling Cary Grant -- learn to value each other, to educate themselves in equality, to remarry. Cavell recognizes that the actresses in these movie -- often the dazzling Katherine Hepburn -- are what made them possible. If read not as an account of beautiful people in hilarious situations, but as a deeply philosophical discussion of marriage, his book contains what are almost aphorisms of marital achievement. For example: ....'[The romance of remarriage] poses a structure in which we are permanently in doubt who the hero is, that is, whether it is the male or female who is the active partner, which of them is in quest, who is following whom.'
Cary grant & Katherine Hepburn "Above all, despite the sexual attractiveness of the actors in the movies he discusses, Cavell knows that sexuality is not the ultimate secret in these marriage: 'in God's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. Here is the reason that these relationships strike us as having the quality of friendship, a further factor in their exhilaration for us.'
"He is wise enough, moreover, to emphasize 'the mystery of marriage by finding that neither law nor sexuality (nor, by implication, progeny) is sufficient to ensure true marriage and suggesting that what provides legitimacy is the mutual willingness for remarriage, for a sort of continuous affirmation. Remarriage, hence marriage, is, whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking.
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Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Writing a Woman's Life)
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Cryptocurrencies may provide an illusion of financial freedom and control, but the reality is that users often rely on centralized exchanges and wallets, introducing counterparty risk and potential loss of control over their assets. The difference though is that its nearly impossible to hold these counterparties accountable. They're selling you one kind of freedom for the price of many additional risks. I was once a little woo’d by the possibility of what crypto could offer the world, but on a net basis with all things considered holistically, I'd say it's not worth it. As a society, we need government fiat. And we need banks. And we need regulatory entities with the authority and the power to ensure order and accountability at scale.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust. This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments. A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings. Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
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Patrick Lencioni (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable)
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I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann’s love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine’s whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.
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Marcel Proust (Sodom and Gomorrah)
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When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily
basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to for everyone, we have to start
accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice: it's also a matter of simple economics.
By accounting for women's care responsibilities in urban planning, we make it easier for women to engage fully in the paid workforce - and as we will see in the next chapter, this is a significant driver of GDP. By accounting for the sexual violence women face and introducing preventative measures - like providing enough single-sex public toilets we save money in the long run by reducing the significant economic cost of violence against women. When we account for female socialisation in the design
of our open spaces and public activities, we again save money in the long run by ensuring women's long-term mental and physical health.
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In short, designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources. It's a matter of priorities, and, currently, whether unthinkingly or not, we just aren't prioritising
women. This is manifestly unjust, and economically illiterate. Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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Krishna, what happens to he who strays from the path of insight? Does he lose out on both: happiness promised by wisdom and pleasures promised by indulgence? Does he perish like a torn cloud?—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 37 and 38 (paraphrased). Krishna replies that nothing is wasted or destroyed in the cosmos. All efforts are recorded and they impact future lives. Knowledge acquired in the past plays a role in the wisdom of future lives. Those unsuccessful in realization in this life will be reborn. Their efforts will not go in waste. They will ensure they are born in a wise family, where they can strive again. They will be driven to wisdom on account of memories and impressions of previous lives. By striving through many lives, they untangle themselves to unite with divinity.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 41 to 45
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Devdutt Pattanaik (My Gita)
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It is fair to argue that conservative and liberal media in the West are two sides of the same coin. I personally see CNN and Fox News as complementing not contradicting each other. The former gives viewers the false impression of being liberal and critical of the system, while the latter vehemently promotes and defends the existing militaristic, racist, and supremacist system in place. The former gives the world the false impression of freedom and democracy where everything and everyone can be criticized and held accountable (which is far from the truth), while the latter constantly agitates the public to ensure that the predominantly militaristic, capitalist, and racist system remains intact. The outside world thinks that America is so free to have a newspaper like the NYTimes, but they don’t realize that the system operates precisely as Fox News wants it to.
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”
Louis Yako
“
Come inside with me,” he urged, increasing the pressure on her elbow, “and I’ll begin making it up to you.”
Elizabeth let herself be drawn forward a few steps and hesitated. “This is a mistake. Everyone will see us and think we’ve started it all over again-“
“No, they won’t,” he promised. “There’s a rumor spreading like fire in there that I tried to get you in my clutches two years ago, but without a title to tempt you I didn’t have a chance. Since acquiring a title is a holy crusade for most of them, they’ll admire your sense. Now that I have a title, I’m expected to use it to try to succeed where I failed before-as a way of bolstering my wounded male pride.” Reaching up to brush a wisp of hair from her soft cheek, he said, “I’m sorry. It was the best I could do with what I had to work with-we were seen together in compromising circumstances. Since they’d never believe nothing happened, I could only make them think I was in pursuit and you were evading.”
She flinched from his touch but didn’t shove his hand away. “You don’t understand. What’s happening to me in there is no less than I deserve. I knew what the rules were, and I broke them when I stayed with you at the cottage. You didn’t force me to stay. I broke the rules, and-“
“Elizabeth,” he interrupted in a voice edge with harsh remorse, “if you won’t do anything else for me, at least stop exonerating me for that weekend. I can’t bear it. I exerted more force on you than you understand.”
Longing to kiss her, Ian had to be satisfied instead with trying to convince her his plan would work, because he now needed her help to ensure its success. In a teasing voice he said, “I think you’re underrating my gift for strategy and subtlety. Come and dance with me, and I’ll prove to you how easily most of the male minds in there have been manipulated.”
Despite his confidence, moments after they entered the ballroom Ian noticed the increasing coldness of the looks being directed at them, and he knew a moment of real alarm-until he glanced at Elizabeth as he took her in his arms for a waltz and realized the cause of it. “Elizabeth,” he said in a low, urgent voice, gazing down at her bent head, “stop looking meek! Put your nose in the air and cut me dead or flirt with me, but do not on any account look humble, because these people will interpret it as guilt!”
Elizabeth, who had been staring at his shoulder, as she'd done with her other dancing partners, tipped her head back and looked at him in confusion. "What?"
Ian's heart turned over when the chandeliers overhead revealed the wounded look in her glorious green eyes. Realizing logic and lectures weren't going to help her give the performance he badly needed her to give, he tried the tack that had, in Scotland, made her stop crying and begin to laugh: He tried to tease her. Casting about for a subject, he said quickly, "Belhaven is certainly in fine looks tonight-pink satin pantaloons. I asked him for the name of his tailor so that I could order a pair for myself."
Elizabeth looked at him as if he'd taken leave of his senses; then his warning about looking meek hit home, and she began to understand what he wanted her to do. That added to the comic image of Ian's tall, masculine frame in those absurd pink pantaloons enabled her to manage a weak smile. "I have greatly admired those pantaloons myself," she said. "Will you also order a yellow satin coat to complement the look?"
He smiled. "I thought-puce."
"An unusual combination," she averred softly, "but one that I am sure will make you the envy of all who behold you.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".
”
”
Peter L. Berger
“
It is vital to acknowledge the new reality before taking any steps to change the existing policies. The world is not the same anymore. Tackling religion-based terrorism is perhaps one, if not the most serious threat the world face in the 21st century. Unfortunately, more terror attacks like the ones in San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris are expected to occur. While those attacks were a reminder of the challenges that lay ahead, they exposed the need to have an improved early warning system that may ultimately save civilian lives. Such a system should take into account the shortcomings of the current warning frameworks and evaluate the usefulness of warnings generated by improved models that would cover a broad range of attacks, larger geographic areas within the country in question and a wide range of potential attack scenarios. The system is likely to facilitate well informed decisions on the assessment of information gathered from different sources. In this vein, finding a balance between protecting human rights and ensuring national security is key.
”
”
Widad Akreyi
“
We challenge each other because if I’m your keeper, your underskirt can’t be showing on my watch. Your mistake can’t go unchecked; otherwise I’m leaving your back wide-open, when I said I got it. It’s about holding each other accountable and calling each other in (not out) when we fall on our faces. If you’re making piss-poor decisions, your friends should be able to pull you by your collar and tell you to get your shit together. A friend group that does that is a gift, and will always ensure that we are being the version of ourselves that we’ll be proud of. Otherwise, we’ll have to answer to them, and we don’t want that smoke. There are so many rewards to building a proper village that the accompanying fear isn’t worth it. Throughout my life, I’ve felt betrayed and abandoned and rejected by people who I let into my life. We’ve all felt it. It’s knocked me on my ass a few times. But I also think about what others have done for me or said to me that has lifted me up or pushed me forward. Those moments beat any of the betrayals. Those times attest to the need to never harden myself completely.
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Luvvie Ajayi Jones (Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual)
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It’s important to remember that most television is not just entertainment: it’s also narrative. And it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing. In the C.Y. writers today, the narrative patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient — not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end — openly acknowledged — is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art."
- from"Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
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David Foster Wallace (Both Flesh and Not: Essays)
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So certain were experts that neonates felt no pain that through the mid-1980s major surgeries on newborn babies were sometimes performed without anesthesia. These included major cardiovascular procedures requiring prying open rib cages, puncturing lungs, and tying off major arteries. Though provided with no pharmacologic agents to blunt the pain that cracking ribs or cutting through the sternum might have induced, babies were given powerful agents to induce paralysis—ensuring an immobile (and undoubtedly terrified) patient on whom to operate. Jill Lawson’s remarkable story of her premature son, Jeffrey, and his unanesthetized heart surgery provides a heartbreaking account of such a procedure. After Jeffrey’s death in 1985, Lawson’s campaign to educate the medical profession about the need to treat pain in the young literally changed the field. And likely led to improved awareness of pain in animals, too. bA technique called clicker training pairs a metallic tick-tock! with a food treat every time the animal performs a desired behavior. Eventually the animal comes to associate the sound of the clicker with the feel-good neurochemical rewards of the food. When the treat is discontinued, the animal will continue doing the behavior, because
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Barbara Natterson-Horowitz (Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing)
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On Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 4:34 A.M., John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, received what looked like an email from Google about his personal Gmail account. “Hi John Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account,” read the email from “the Gmail Team.” It noted that the attempted intrusion had come from an IP address in Ukraine. The email went on: “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” The Gmail Team helpfully included a link to a site where Podesta could make the recommended password change. That morning, Podesta forwarded the email to his chief of staff, Sara Latham, who then sent it along to Charles Delavan, a young IT staffer at the Clinton campaign. At 9:54 AM that morning, Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account… It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.” Delavan later asserted to colleagues that he had committed a typo. He had meant to write that “this is not a legitimate email.” Not everybody on the Clinton campaign would believe him. But Delavan had an argument in his favor. In his response to Latham, he had included the genuine link Podesta needed to use to change his password. Yet for some reason Podesta clicked on the link in the phony email and used a bogus site to create a new password. The Russians now had the keys to his emails and access to the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.
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Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)
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John Adams was keenly aware of the relationship between secrecy and corruption in government and the preservation of liberty. Many of the Founding Fathers understood the importance of transparency in a nation’s rulers. James Madison wrote that “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.” Thomas Jefferson said that “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.” Judicial Watch has always believed that knowing the “characters and conduct” of the individuals who serve in the government and ensuring that the public is “informed” about what its government is doing is crucial to preserving our great republic. That is why for over twenty-two years we have been the most active user of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to promote transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law. We are the nation’s largest and most effective government watchdog group that works to advance the public interest. Transparency is all about self-governance. If we don’t know what the government is doing, how is that self-governance? How is that even a republic? When we were founded in 1994, we used the FOIA open records law to root out corruption in the Clinton administration. During the Bush administration, we used it to combat that administration’s penchant for improper secrecy. But the Bush administration pales in comparison to the Obama administration. Today, our government is bigger than ever, and also the most secretive in recent memory.
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Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
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Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making.
At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work.
Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense.
It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
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Edward N. Luttwak
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Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units).
This is the conclusion we've been chasing. Notice that although black holes are central to the reasoning, the analysis applies to any region of space, whether or not a black hole is actually present. If you max out a region's storage capacity, you'll create a black hole, but as long as you stay under the limit, no black hole will form.
I hasten to add that in any practical sense, the information storage limit is of no concern. Compared with today's rudimentary storage devices, the potential storage capacity on the surface of a spatial region is humongous. A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortable within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 10^70 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 10^70 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints.
Yet as a guide to how the universe works, the storage limitations are telling. Think of any region of space, such as the room in which I'm writing or the one in which you're reading. Take a Wheelerian perspective and imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing-information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we're governed, seemingly take place within the region, it's natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But the results just derived suggest an alternative view. For black holes, we found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Susskind and 'tHooft stressed that the lesson should be general: since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggested, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.
If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much like a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two-I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes-would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.
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Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos)
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OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY
I don’t know of people who do everything from going to school, learning different skills and basically develop themselves so that they stay at home. It’s ingrained in every kid that they should study hard and excel so that they can get good jobs and live well. With that said, working is what makes us build nations and fulfill some our dreams so it’s important to ensure that the work environment is kept safe and comfortable for workers so that they can remain productive for the longest time. However as long as we are living there will SWMS always be greedy employers who will take short cuts or fail to protect their employees and this is where OSHA(occupational safety and health administration)comes in to rectify these issues. Occupational safety is ensuring that employees work in danger free environment.
There are many industries of different nature and hence the possible hazards vary. For example in the textile and clothing industry, employees deal with dyes, chemicals and machines that spin , knit and weave to ensure production. In some countries there have been cases of sweatshops where people make clothes in poorly ventilated places for long hours. The tools of trade in all industries are still the ones that cause hazards e.g. machines can cut people, chemicals emit poisonous fumes or burn the skin and clothes etc.
Its therefore the mandate of employers to ensure work places are safe for workers and incase the industry uses chemicals or equipments that may harm the workers in any way, they should provide protective gear. Employers can also seek the services of occupational safety specialists who can inspect their companies to ensure they adhere to the set health and safety standards. These specialists can also help formulate programs that will prevent hazards and injuries. Workers should report employers to OSHA if they fail to comply. As a worker you now know it’s partly your duty to hold your employer accountable so do not agree to work in a hazardous environment.
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Peter Gabriel
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proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’
Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’
Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.
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Dennis Prager (The Rational Bible: Exodus)
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Never treat your launch team like a core group. It’s not. Your launch team is a time-limited, purpose-driven team. It ends with the debriefing session following your launch. At that meeting, release the launch team members to join a ministry team of their choice. Your launch team will not stay with you over the long haul. Many church planters make the mistake of thinking that the people from their launch team (whom they have grown to love) will be the same people who will grow the church with them in the long term. That is seldom, if ever, the case.
While it’s sad to see people go, it’s part of God’s process in growing your church. So, expect it, be prepared for it, and be thankful that you have the opportunity to serve with so many different people at different points along the journey.
Preparing a launch team to maximize your first service is first and foremost a spiritual enterprise. Pray and fast—a lot.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that being a solid leader undermines the spirit of teamwork. You can lead a team, hold people accountable and ensure that things get done in a way that fosters teamwork and gives glory to God. So get ready.
show people your heart before you ask for their hand. People want to know that you care, and they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. If you can articulate your vision in a way that excites people, they’ll want to be on your team.
The launch team is not a democracy. Don’t vote. You are the leader. Lead.
While it’s true that you want to share the gospel with as many people as possible, you will need to develop a clear picture of the specific demographic your new church is targeting in order to effectively reach the greatest number of people. Diffused light has little impact, but focused light has the ability to cut through steel. Take time to focus so that you are able to reach the specific people God has called you to.
1. Who Are the Key Population Groups Living in My Area?
2. What Population Group Is Not Being Reached Effectively?
3. What Population Group Do I Best Relate To?
Healthy organisms grow, and that includes your church. If you feel stagnation setting in, your job is not to push growth any way you can but to identify the barriers that are hindering you and remove them.
The only people who like full rooms are preachers and worship leaders. If you ignore this barrier, your church will stop growing.
Early on, it’s best to remain flexible. The last thing you want to do is get in a position in which God can’t grow you because you aren’t logistically prepared. What if twice as many people showed up this Sunday? Would you be ready?
When a lead pastor isn’t growing: The church stops growing, the sermons are stale, The staff and volunteers stop growing, The passion for ministry wanes.
Keeping your church outwardly focused is just as important now as it was during your prelaunch stage. Make sure that you are continually working to expand God’s kingdom, not building your own.
A healthy launch is the single greatest indicator of future church health.
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Nelson Searcy (Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch)
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A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?”
He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course.
When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity.
When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless.
Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly.
When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice.
I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street.
But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance.
That is why we need books like this one.
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Janine Di Giovanni
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The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows: 1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:- (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court. 2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel. 3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework. 4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity. 5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account. 6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS). 7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view: (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions. 8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.
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M. Laxmikanth (Governance in India)
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Thus, multiple regression requires two important tasks: (1) specification of independent variables and (2) testing of the error term. An important difference between simple regression and multiple regression is the interpretation of the regression coefficients in multiple regression (b1, b2, b3, …) in the preceding multiple regression model. Although multiple regression produces the same basic statistics discussed in Chapter 14 (see Table 14.1), each of the regression coefficients is interpreted as its effect on the dependent variable, controlled for the effects of all of the other independent variables included in the regression. This phrase is used frequently when explaining multiple regression results. In our example, the regression coefficient b1 shows the effect of x1 on y, controlled for all other variables included in the model. Regression coefficient b2 shows the effect of x2 on y, also controlled for all other variables in the model, including x1. Multiple regression is indeed an important and relatively simple way of taking control variables into account (and much easier than the approach shown in Appendix 10.1). Key Point The regression coefficient is the effect on the dependent variable, controlled for all other independent variables in the model. Note also that the model given here is very different from estimating separate simple regression models for each of the independent variables. The regression coefficients in simple regression do not control for other independent variables, because they are not in the model. The word independent also means that each independent variable should be relatively unaffected by other independent variables in the model. To ensure that independent variables are indeed independent, it is useful to think of the distinctively different types (or categories) of factors that affect a dependent variable. This was the approach taken in the preceding example. There is also a statistical reason for ensuring that independent variables are as independent as possible. When two independent variables are highly correlated with each other (r2 > .60), it sometimes becomes statistically impossible to distinguish the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, controlled for the other. The variables are statistically too similar to discern disparate effects. This problem is called multicollinearity and is discussed later in this chapter. This problem is avoided by choosing independent variables that are not highly correlated with each other. A WORKING EXAMPLE Previously (see Chapter 14), the management analyst with the Department of Defense found a statistically significant relationship between teamwork and perceived facility productivity (p <.01). The analyst now wishes to examine whether the impact of teamwork on productivity is robust when controlled for other factors that also affect productivity. This interest is heightened by the low R-square (R2 = 0.074) in Table 14.1, suggesting a weak relationship between teamwork and perceived productivity. A multiple regression model is specified to include the effects of other factors that affect perceived productivity. Thinking about other categories of variables that could affect productivity, the analyst hypothesizes the following: (1) the extent to which employees have adequate technical knowledge to do their jobs, (2) perceptions of having adequate authority to do one’s job well (for example, decision-making flexibility), (3) perceptions that rewards and recognition are distributed fairly (always important for motivation), and (4) the number of sick days. Various items from the employee survey are used to measure these concepts (as discussed in the workbook documentation for the Productivity dataset). After including these factors as additional independent variables, the result shown in Table 15.1 is
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.
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Larry Bossidy (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done)
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The disease or damaged sewer somewhere to eat on the needs of the environment of the property or in the office is not immediate. Drinking water supply as a result of the expiry of promoting damage, as a significant drop due to the free flow of H2O or ruin your furniture imported and domestic wood. Therefore, the same under the sink, although the cover or part of the house damaged, is smart, a plumber can choose the rescue and hardened pipes quickly. Even before he published a plumber in the house, the important point is high absolutely certain that the supply mechanically interlocked with H2O is on drunk driving to create, so it does not come through other more harm in the sense of your own home , Or, if this type of pipes has a main valve arranged directly detected water meter. Some require keys, and some just came clockwise at the end of lead in drinking water purchased at home alternative pipeline valves.
Today, every time you select a plumber, it is less complicated to the user to check the direction of friends and spouse and children advice. Family and friends are to be generally easier to purchase self-guided tour, and will be used by similar problems, are able to keep track direction when they can to implement fantastic plumber composed. Examine the site and installers who can access services, many alternatives are completely abandoned. Plumbers usually contain effective advantage proposals with their name and ask their previous customers to ensure that their correct answers about the plumber. The first person with specialized potentially provide unique designs, what and who himself is a must.
At the time, in fact, to relax tight, you can ask to self has types and issues, as they were only in the organization. Added opinion does not necessarily mean a lot more experience, no matter when. In addition, plumbers constructive part’s sure you as needed to be able to manage the project management. Plumber’s consultant can make sure their professionalism. If your own way, one after another, before the service, appearance and adequate compensation and professional identity can be reproduced in the way see that they treat their business. And most important ideals, what little. At any time to explore alternative wages to leave the direction of the conversation, such as supply and property prices have some people will be surprised to see how you will use the monthly bill too important to save for economic time. That's because each of us the importance of creating knew, of course, considering all costs move towards Bill damage to your account, after the tube to take healed.
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Boiler Repair
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Here are eight tips for writing effective cover letters. Address the cover letter to a specific person, ensuring the correct name, title, company, and address. This shows respect for the person you are sending the résumé to. “To Whom It May Concern” salutations should be used only if you can’t determine the name of the hiring person or the company (for instance, when responding to a blind ad). If you were referred by someone, be sure this is included in the first sentence of the cover letter: “Jennifer Wells suggested I contact you in regard to an accounts receivable position you have open …” It’s an attention grabber. If asked to include salary history or requirements, you must address this or risk being disqualified. Provide a healthy range, such as “Over the past five years I have earned between $35,000 and $48,000. However, I am open to any reasonable offer consistent with my ability to produce results and meet your performance expectations.” If asked for salary requirements, use the same strategy: “I am aware that the salary range for a loss prevention manager in the Houston area averages between $75,000 and $110,000. Given my experience and, most importantly, my ability to make significant contributions to your company, I would hope to be on the upper end of this scale.” If you are sending the résumé out electronically, the cover letter can be inserted as the e-mail itself; just attach your résumé. If you prefer that your cover letter is the first page of the attachment, that’s fine. But the general guideline is not to attach multiple files. Make it easy on the hiring manager and send only one attachment or file to open (unless you have a good reason to do otherwise). Do not rehash what is on the résumé. This is disrespectful of the reader’s time. If you have done a good job with your résumé, you want the cover letter to quickly entice the hiring manager to read your résumé. Cover letters should not be preachy. Sales managers know that sales are the heartbeat of any company; you don’t have to lecture them on this. Nurse supervisors know the importance of compassionate patient care; you don’t have to tell them what they already know. Keep the letter short and concise. The cover letter is not the place to preach or teach. It’s the place to invite recipients to read your résumé! Finally, the four most important words on the cover letter are “I respect your time.” The following cover letter is a sample template to use in these challenging and troubled times. Notice the first four words of the second paragraph.
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Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
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The study showed that both boys and girls who have had sex are three times more likely to be depressed than their friends who are still virgins. The study accounted for other factors in the lives of the young people, ensuring an accurate comparison with their peers. The girls who became sexually active were three times more likely to have attempted suicide as their virgin friends, while the sexually active boys were fully seven times more likely to have attempted suicide.8
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Freda McKissic Bush (Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting Our Children)
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successful businesses operate with a crystal clear vision that is shared by everyone. They have the right people in the right seats. They have a pulse on their operations by watching and managing a handful of numbers on a weekly basis. They identify and solve issues promptly in an open and honest environment. They document their processes and ensure that they are followed by everyone. They establish priorities for each employee and ensure that a high level of trust, communication, and accountability exists on each team.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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In sum, where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and regimentation of time ('Time is Money'), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards. Its ultimate values-Power, Profit, Prestige-derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age. The first produced the universal accountancy of profit and loss; the second ensured productive efficiency in men as well as machines; the third introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk's search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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Roosevelt’s administration ensured that African Americans were hired both by the New Deal agencies and by government contractors. The Work Projects Administration employed 350,000 African American workers, who accounted for 15 percent of the WPA’s workforce. African Americans comprised more than 10 percent of the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration issued contracts only to companies that agreed to hire a certain number of African American workers.41
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Rawn James Jr. (The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military)
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The integrity of accounting information is enhanced in three primary ways. First, certain
institutional features add significantly to the integrity of accounting information. These
features include standards for the preparation of accounting information, an internal control structure, and audits of financial statements. Second, several professional accounting
organizations play unique roles in adding to the integrity of accounting information. Finally,
and perhaps most important, is the personal competence, judgment, and ethical behavior of
professional accountants. These three elements of the accounting profession come together to
ensure that users of accounting information—investors, creditors, managers, and others—can
rely on the information to be a fair representation of what it purports to represent.
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Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
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In summary, successful businesses operate with a crystal clear vision that is shared by everyone. They have the right people in the right seats. They have a pulse on their operations by watching and managing a handful of numbers on a weekly basis. They identify and solve issues promptly in an open and honest environment. They document their processes and ensure that they are followed by everyone. They establish priorities for each employee and ensure that a high level of trust, communication, and accountability exists on each team.
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Gino Wickman (Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business)
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In post-terror southern Sri Lanka, people kept the memory of the Bheeshanaya alive as an ethical issue and continued to grapple with the unreconciled past through these karmic stories. In the absence of any formal justice, then, Buddhism and its law of karma, as well as giving meaning to their experiences of violence in the past, ensured that ‘perpetrators’ of violence were held to account in the present.
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Dhana Hughes (Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka: Life after Terror (Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series))
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Countries competing against one another in the same array of products and services is not covered by Ricardian trade theory. Offshoring doesn’t fit the Ricardian or the competitive idea of free trade. In fact, offshoring is not trade. Offshoring is the practice of a firm relocating its production of goods or services for its home market to a foreign country. When an American firm moves production offshore, US GDP declines by the amount of the offshored production, and foreign GDP increases by that amount. Employment and consumer income decline in the US and rise abroad. The US tax base shrinks, resulting in reductions in public services or in higher taxes or a switch from tax finance to bond finance and higher debt service cost. When the offshored production comes back to the US to be marketed, the US trade deficit increases dollar for dollar. The trade deficit is financed by turning over to foreigners US assets and their future income streams. Profits, dividends, interest, capital gains, rents, and tolls from leased toll roads now flow from American pockets to foreign pockets, thus worsening the current account deficit as well. Who benefits from these income losses suffered by Americans? Clearly, the beneficiary is the foreign country to which the production is moved. The other prominent beneficiaries are the shareholders and the executives of the companies that offshore production. The lower labor costs raise profits, the share price, and the “performance bonuses” of corporate management. Offshoring’s proponents claim that the lost incomes from job losses are offset by benefits to consumers from lower prices. Allegedly, the harm done to those who lose their jobs is more than offset by the benefit consumers in general get from the alleged lower prices. Yet, proponents are unable to cite studies that support this claim. The claim is based on the unexamined assumption that offshoring is free trade and, thereby, mutually beneficial. Proponents of jobs offshoring also claim that the Americans who are left unemployed soon find equal or better jobs. This claim is based on the assumption that the demand for labor ensures full employment, and that people whose jobs have been moved abroad can be retrained for new jobs that are equal to or better than the jobs that were lost. This claim is false.
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Paul Craig Roberts (The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West)
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In 1945 Himmler ordered the camps to be evacuated and charged the commanders with ensuring that not one of the prisoners would fall into Allied hands. On January 17, some 60,000 detainees from Auschwitz were evacuated on foot and sent on a death march to the city of Wodzislaw. Those who could not continue or who fell behind were shot by the SS guards. Some 15,000 died during the march and the survivors were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where they were liberated by British forces in April 1945.
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Larry Berg (Auschwitz: The Shocking Story & Secrets of the Holocaust Death Camp (Auschwitz, Holocaust, Jewish, History, Eyewitness Account, World War 2 Book 1))
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For prisoners living in Birkenau, life was even worse, with their barracks frequently damp and lice and rats a frequent problem. In addition, they had access to water only in the kitchen barracks, which meant they could not wash and had to go around dirty. They also had to perform their bodily functions in outdoors latrines. Although bathhouses and disinfecting equipment were installed, overcrowding again ensured that prisoners had limited use of them. Given these conditions, it should not be surprising that disease and death was rampant.
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Larry Berg (Auschwitz: The Shocking Story & Secrets of the Holocaust Death Camp (Auschwitz, Holocaust, Jewish, History, Eyewitness Account, World War 2 Book 1))
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Here are the six steps you need to take: 1. Decide on your product or service. 2. Set up a website, even a very basic one (you can get a free one from WordPress.org). 3. Develop an offer (an offer is distinct from a product or service; see Chapter 7 for help). 4. Ensure you have a way to get paid (get a free PayPal account to start). 5. Announce your offer to the world (see Chapter 9 for more on this). 6. Learn from steps 1 through 5, then repeat.
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Anonymous
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Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules. President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule. "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards. Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)
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Anonymous
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Krishna, what happens to he who strays from the path of insight? Does he lose out on both: happiness promised by wisdom and pleasures promised by indulgence? Does he perish like a torn cloud?—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 37 and 38 (paraphrased). Krishna replies that nothing is wasted or destroyed in the cosmos. All efforts are recorded and they impact future lives. Knowledge acquired in the past plays a role in the wisdom of future lives. Those unsuccessful in realization in this life will be reborn. Their efforts will not go in waste. They will ensure they are born in a wise family, where they can strive again. They will be driven to wisdom on account of memories and impressions of previous lives. By striving through many lives, they untangle themselves to unite with divinity.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 41 to 45 (paraphrased).
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Devdutt Pattanaik (My Gita)
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Petraeus’s acolytes arrived in Baghdad in February of 2007 armed with the holy writ: Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, came right from the font, written by the master and his team during the general’s interlude commanding the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 2005 to 2007. Leavenworth writes doctrine, the Army’s how-to manuals. During his tenure on the Kansas prairie, David Petraeus ensured that his views on counterinsurgency were recorded. Now they would be applied.
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Daniel P. Bolger (Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars)
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The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items
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Anonymous
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Roger Ailes created the network to ensure Watergate-style accountability would not happen again to a president he supported.
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Sarah Kendzior (Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America)
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The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
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They base their programs on local demands and ideas, put local staff in management positions, strive to be accountable to intended beneficiaries, rely on neighboring citizens to ensure their security; in brief, they escape the dominant modes of operation, suggest alternate ones, and in doing so undermine Peaceland’s structure of inequality.
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Severine Autesserre (Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Problems of International Politics))
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Jointplex 360 – Relief "Joint Pain" 100% Works | "Cost To Purchase" And More!
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Ensure that the cash flow into the organisation is regular and long-term. Outstandings have to be reduced. Collections from customers should be in time. A good banking and accounting system should be in place. Monitor finance reports regularly to keep an eye on these.
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Radhakrishnan Pillai (Corporate Chanakya, 10th Anniversary Edition—2021)
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Are your ways of working open, accessible and transparent?
Traditional approaches to quantitative data collection and analysis are misunderstood as an objective account of reality; an assumption that masks decisions made throughout the design process. A queer approach to data is also influenced by biases and assumptions; those engaged in queer data practices therefore need to describe how decisions are made, in accessible language, and its effect on the results presented. Openness about the limitations of data helps ensure that an undercount or misrepresentation of data about LGBTQ people is not used undermine political and social advances.
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Kevin Guyan (Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures))
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Islam emphasizes reason; it is the basis upon which humans are held accountable for their choices. It is also the characteristic that elevates the human being above the rest of Allah's creation, if that gift is used appropriately.
Islamic law is designed in such a way as to preserve reason and intellect and to ensure its well-being and freedom. Islam prohibits the use of any substance that may affect the mind negatively or decrease its ability in any way.
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Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
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Strong in services rendered, the now wealthy heirs of Power’s lawyer-servants claimed henceforward to control its actions, and assuredly there was no other body of men in the country better qualified to hold Power in check.
If officers were bought the control over the sales exercised by this body hedged in the appointment of a new magistrate with guarantees which ensured that no senate was ever recruited better.
If the members of the Parliament were not elected by the public, they deserved on that account more of the public confidence, as being less it's flatterers by design than its champions by principle. Taken as a whole, they formed a weightier and more capable body of men than those of the British Parliament. Was it right, then, for the monarchy to accept and sanction this counter-Power? Or did its dignity demand that it react against the pretension of Parliament? That was a policy of one party, which called itself Richelieu’s heir and it was in fact, led by d’Aiguillon, a great-nephew of the great Cardinal. But if the need was to smash now this aristocracy of the robe and extend that the royal authority even further, it had to be done as in former days to the plaudits of the common people and by employing a new set of plebeians against the present wearers of periwigs. Mirabeau saw as much, but that d’Aiguillon’s faction were blind to it.
That faction consisted of nobles who had been more or less plucked by the monarchial Power and were now getting new feathers by installing themselves into wealth-giving apparatus of state which had been built by the plebeian clerks. Finding that offices were now of greater value than manors. They fell to on the offices. Finding that the bulk of the feudal dues had been diverted into the coffers of the state, they put their hands in them. And, occupying every place and obstructing every avenue leading to Power, they succeeded in weakening it both by their incapacity and by their feeble efforts to prevent it from attracting, as formerly, to its banners and the aspirations of the common people.
In this way the men who should have served the state, finding themselves discarded, turned Jacobin. In the cold shades of a parliamentary opposition, which, if it had been accepted, would have transformed the absolute monarchy into a limited one, a plebeian elite champed at the bit; had it been admitted to office, it would have extended even further the centralizing power of the throne. So much was it part of its nature to serve the royal authority that it was to ensure its continuance even when there was no king.
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Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)
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Then there’s project management software (sometimes referred to as task management or jobs management), which acts as an accountability and management tool. The goal of this software is to track all of your projects and ensure that every team member knows the tasks they should be working on and when they’re due. This also gets all your team communication, relating to any project, out of your email and into a central location.
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David Jenyns (SYSTEMology: Create time, reduce errors and scale your profits with proven business systems)
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The secret to ensuring your business develops a culture where systems are not just created, but actually used, is to introduce some level of accountability.
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David Jenyns (SYSTEMology: Create time, reduce errors and scale your profits with proven business systems)
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Just as the blockchain-distributed ledger is used to assure bitcoin users that others aren’t “double-spending” their currency holdings—in other words, to prevent what would otherwise be rampant digital counterfeiting—the Azraq blockchain pilot ensures that people aren’t double-spending their food entitlements. That’s a pretty important requirement in refugee camps, where supplies are limited and where organized crime outfits have been known to steal and hoard food for profit. And it means that refugees like Najah will always be able to prove that their accounts are legitimate.
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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The Scaled Architecture you will discover in this book comes with a large set of data management principles. It requires you, for example, to identify and classify genuine and unique data, fix data quality at the source, administer metadata precisely, and draw boundaries carefully. When enterprises follow these principles, they empower their teams to distribute and use data quickly while staying decoupled. This architecture also comes with a governance model: engineers need to learn how to make good abstractions and data pipelines, while business data owners need to take accountability for their data and its quality, ensuring that the context is clear to everyone.
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Piethein Strengholt (Data Management at Scale: Best Practices for Enterprise Architecture)
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in the content and bring ideas to discuss during the session. Then, when everyone was together, Craig facilitated a dialogue on the topic and ensured that everyone had a chance to share their thoughts and connect them to both their group and the work that they did. Prior to these sessions, Craig shared that his colleagues often squabbled over resources, resisted collaboration on even simple ideas, and it felt like people were actively working against one another to build up their own department while breaking down others. He was amazed that, as he introduced these leadership concepts, like team trust, credibility, and accountability, both the conversation and cooperation among peers gradually shifted. The risk that he took—reimagining meetings and sharing new ideas—transformed his environment.
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Angie Morgan (Bet on You: How to Win with Risk)
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Fighting injustice can have a way of turning people against each other instead of being able to clap back at the origins of the problems. Tackling the deep and complex work of combating racial, social, economic, and environmental injustice and working for access, equity, equality, eradicating isms, peace, and ensuring human sustainability requires boldness, humility, hypervigilance, and relentless commitment to accountability . . .
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Kristen Lee (Worth the Risk: How to Microdose Bravery to Grow Resilience, Connect More, and Offer Yourself to the World)
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We always ensure the best quality and safe service for you. You have chosen the right place. So buy verified Skrill account from (dosmm.com).
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dosmm.com
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Fighting injustice can have a way of turning people against each other instead of being able to clap back at the origins of the problems. Tackling the deep and complex work of combating racial, social, economic, and environmental injustice and working for access, equity, equality, eradicating ism's, peace, and ensuring human sustainability requires boldness, humility, hyper-vigilance, and relentless commitment to accountability...
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Kristen Lee (Worth the Risk: How to Microdose Bravery to Grow Resilience, Connect More, and Offer Yourself to the World)
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As a leader, to what extent do you: —— Establish, recognize, reward, and maintain accountability for goals that contribute to human benefit, so that the effects on other people are obvious? —— Emphasize and reinforce the core values of the individuals who work in the organization, so that congruence between what the organization accomplishes and what people value is transparent? —— Tie the outcomes of the work to an extended time frame, so that long-term benefits are clear? —— Ensure that contribution goals take precedence over acquisition or achievement goals for individuals in the organization?
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Kim S. Cameron (Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance)
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1.2.1 Action item: The U.S. Department of Justice should develop and disseminate case studies that provide examples where past injustices were publicly acknowledged by law enforcement agencies in a manner to help build community trust. 1.3 Recommendation: Law enforcement agencies should establish a culture of transparency and accountability in order to build public trust and legitimacy. This will help ensure decision making is understood and in accord with stated policy.
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U.S. Government (Final Report of The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing May 2015)
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With former President Trump’s emphasis to “Make America Great Again,” his four years disrupted the entire globalist agenda, as his goals included creating jobs, building new plants, providing tax breaks, and pressuring American based companies to return factories to the United States. For the first time, the Chinese Communists were held accountable in trade agreements. However, these wealthy globalists were impacted by the sanctions of China and set out to ensure Trump would never serve a second term.
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Perry Stone (America's Apocalyptic Reset: Unmasking the Radical's Blueprints to Silence Christians, Patriots, and Conservatives)
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Sonnet of Science
Science is but a bridge of time, it can,
Either take us forward or dump us in prehistory.
Science alone does not ensure our advancement,
Unless it's practiced with warmth and accountability.
Sheer reason without any sentiment is,
As dangerous as sheer sentiment without any reason.
In order to forge a world fit for humans,
We must break the ice between reason and emotion.
Problem is that we like picking sides,
Either we are too emotional or too rational.
A civilized human ought to be none of that,
A civilized human acts upon the need of the situation.
So I say o mighty human, be not an intellectual moron.
Science is a means of service, not intellectual gratification.
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Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
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What is particularly poignant in the accounts is the sense of frailness of body pitted against the enormity of the project. These were ordinary women, most of them vendors in Imphal’s Ima Keithel (mother’s market), who now had to transform themselves into an unstoppable force. Despite palpitations of the heart, fits of dizziness, insomnia, failing eyesight, the planning for that action had to be meticulous: inner garments had to be removed leaving only the enaphi and phanek (the upper and lower garment) to make the act of stripping swifter, jewellery needed to be tied in little bundles and kept in safe custody and above all, utmost secrecy had to be maintained with not even close family members being informed in order to ensure that the authorities didn’t get wind of their plans.
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Teresa Rehman (The Mothers of Manipur: Twelve Women Who Made History)
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When he was done ensuring all was accounted for and no threats lurked in the shadows, he looked her over with the same scrutiny: skin (wan and gleaming from the remnants of those hot flashes), lips (pale and cracked), posture (limp and useless), eyes (pain-dimmed and increasingly full of irritation).
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Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
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research university that primarily awards master’s degrees and PhDs, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enroll in a master’s or a doctoral program plummet by 84 percent, from 1,234 to 194 in one year.101 Furthermore, admissions committees were made up solely of experts appointed by the JNU vice-chancellor, flouting university statutes and guidelines followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which stipulate that academics should be involved.102 This made it possible to hire teachers from Hindu nationalist circles,103 with few qualifications,104 and some facing charges of plagiarism.105 In particular, several former ABVP student activists from JNU have been appointed as assistant professors even after being disqualified by the committee in charge of short-listing applicants.106 The vice-chancellor replaced deans in the School of Social Sciences without following appointment procedures, cutting the number of researchers by 80 percent and ceasing to apply rules JNU had set to ensure diversity through a mechanism taking into account the social background and geographic origin of its applicants.107 The new recruitment procedure strongly disadvantaged Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs, who used to make up nearly 50 percent of the student intake and who now accounted for a mere 7 percent. The vice-chancellor also issued ad hoc promotions, nominating recently appointed faculty members to the post of full professor. Conversely, the freeze on promotions for “antigovernment” teachers who should have been promoted on the basis of seniority prompted some of the diktat’s victims to take the matter to court.108 However, even after the court—taking note of the illegality of the rejection procedure—ordered a reexamination of the claimants’ promotions, the latter were once again denied.109
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Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy)
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Why people churn Most churn occurs at the time of the sale. In 2017, my churn was over 60%. I signed up customers who were a poor fit for my solution. Many customers thought Connex was an inventory management tool and others thought we built custom software. We had no onboarding process and we expected users to figure out Connex on their own. Many users failed to choose the right settings, since they are small business owners and not accountants. Since the software failed to work as expected, they quickly cancelled. From experience, most users churn in the first 30 days. It is critical that you reach out to them and ensure the software works correctly. My staff performs an onboarding and ensures Connex works to the customer’s satisfaction. Users churned because my software lacked features that it has today. We noticed a dramatic shift in churn, after implementing a sales and marketing process. In the first quarter of 2021, we had only a handful of refunds out of 100 purchases. People churn because they fail to achieve their desired result or experience. People buy Connex because they want accurate financial information, better order fulfillment, or protection from overselling. If the sync were inaccurate and unreliable then we would lose customers. In other cases, your software may become superfluous. For example, I used the excellent meeting automation tool Calendly. When I migrated to HubSpot, however, I no longer needed Calendly because HubSpot offered meeting automation as part of its suite of offerings. Even if your tool works, your customer’s desired situation or desired outcomes may change. I churned from my ticketing system because I was unhappy with the customer service and experienced technical issues with their chat and phone system. Companies often tack on features that are nowhere near as usable as their core offering.
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Joseph Anderson (The $20 SaaS Company: from Zero to Seven Figures without Venture Capital)
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Ford sent company investigators to where employees lived to ensure they had clean homes and bank savings accounts, and weren’t prone to drunkenness or mistreating their wives.
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Tori Whitaker (A Matter of Happiness)
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First, reframe the purpose of taxes to help build social consensus for the kind of higher-tax, higher-returns public sector that has been a proven success in many Scandinavian countries. And remember, the verbal framing expert George Lakoff advises to choose your words wisely: don’t oppose tax relief—talk about tax justice. Likewise, the notion of public spending is often used by those who oppose it to evoke a never-ending outlay. Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods—such as high-quality schools and effective public transport—that underpin collective well-being.57 Second, end the extraordinary injustice of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting and special exemptions that allow many of the world’s richest people and largest corporations—from Amazon to Zara—to pay negligible tax in the countries in which they live and do business. At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.58 At the same time, transnational corporations shift around $660 billion of their profits each year to near-zero tax jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda and Luxembourg.59 The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is among those focused on tackling this, campaigning worldwide for greater corporate transparency and accountability, fair international tax rules, and progressive national tax systems.60 Third, shifting both personal and corporate taxation away from taxing income streams and towards taxing accumulated wealth—such as real estate and financial assets—will diminish the role played by a growing GDP in ensuring sufficient tax revenue. Of course progressive tax reforms such as these can quickly encounter pushback from the corporate lobby, along with claims of state incompetence and corruption. This only reinforces the importance of strong civic engagement in promoting and defending political democracies that can hold the state to account.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes—or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction. You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work.
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Clayton M. Christensen (How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success)
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Remember this Preventative controls attempt to prevent security incidents. Hardening systems modifies the basic configuration to increase security. Security guards can prevent unauthorized personnel from entering a secure area. Change management processes help prevent outages from configuration changes. An account disablement policy ensures that accounts are disabled when a user leaves the organization.
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Darril Gibson (CompTIA Security+ Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-601 Study Guide)