Entering 2019 Quotes

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

Once we understand that the activity in the spirit realm is more real than what we experience in this world, wonders like this will enter the realm of possibility. Jesus walked through walls (John 20:19), cloaked himself in invisibility (John 8:59), walked on water (Matthew 14:25), and literally spoke death to a fig tree (Matthew 21:19). In all of this he was modeling the power and potential of the Christian faith. Notice, however, that the lack of doubt must be in something called the heart. This leads us into our discussion of the subconscious mind.

It's a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality: my parents were adults before they could share bathrooms with white people; my grandmother was middle-aged before she could confidently enter a voting booth in Alabama. Yet these images fade easily into gentle sepia tones for me today. That's because it's safety, not wisdom, we're after when we look backward. We picture ugly things at a comfortable distance. But Americans distort the past in other ways, too. We see horrible people as exceptional, and their many accomplices as mere captives of their times. We tell ourselves we would contain such wickedness if it arose today, because now we know better. We've learned. In our illusory past, progress has come in decisive and irrevocable strokes.

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

For example, Ms. Sweta from UK invests GBP 100,000 in an FCNR deposit on July 15, 2014 (1 GBP=100 INR) for 5 years at a rate so that the deposit has a maturity amount of GBP 120,000 on July 15, 2019 and simultaneously, enters a forward contract to convert the maturity amount (Sell GBP) at INR 125/GBP i.e. INR 15,000,000. Sweta’s investment of 10,000,000 INR becomes 15,000,000 INR giving her a simple average return of 10%. It will not matter whether the foreign exchange on July 15, 2019 is INR 110/GBP or INR 150/GBP; she would still get 15,000,000 on maturity.

as of 2019, students at Clemson University could use their SEOS-enabled Android device, iPhone, or Apple Watch to enter their dorm, check out a book from the library, or buy a meal at the cafeteria. Expanding its value proposition, SEOS gave ASSA ABLOY a platform upon which access and payment were now intertwined. Your digital identity gets you in the door—and it also gets you lunch.

Using South African apartheid–era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation remains alive to this day. During the 2019 Israeli election campaign, opposition leader Benny Gantz criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for banning US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel and the Palestinian territories. Instead, Gantz said, both women should have been allowed to see “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel … and the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” This was reminiscent of South African apart-heid leader John Vorster statement to the New York Times in 1977 that “the standard of living of the South African Black is two to five times higher than that of any Black country in Africa.”14 One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apart-heid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.

Trump’s presidency rightly caused outrage in large sections of the mainstream media, from his hard-right border policies to separation of young children from their parents. But as despicable as these policies were, little of that anger is expressed when they cover similar Israeli policies. In 2019 Trump reportedly suggested to his aides that to stop migrants entering the US, border guards should shoot them in the leg to slow them down and electrify the fence with sharp spikes on top to pierce human flesh.66 He later asked whether it was possible to build a water-filled trench around the border with snakes and alligators.

The man who timidly, almost fearfully entered her office on January 5, 2019, was, Me. Susanne realized at once, someone she’d met before, long before, in a place whose memory came back to her with such force and clarity that it felt like a sharp clout to her forehead, We think we know now, but still we wonder: Could I be mistaken?

In June 2019, about twenty weeks before the start of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, summarized the conclusions of GPMB’s pandemic report, warning that “we are entering a new phase of high impact epidemics” that would constitute “a new normal” where governments worldwide would strengthen control and restrict the mobility of citizens.

On the evening before the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon and a few of his officers were riding past a pyramid. A man wrapped in a red cloak stepped out of the pyramid and motioned to Napoleon to come forth. Napoleon obliged, telling his officers to wait outside as he stepped into the pyramid with this red-mantled stranger. After an hour of uneasiness, the officers were ready to enter and ensure Napoleon’s safety, but Napoleon stepped out of the pyramid. With a satisfied smile, he demanded they prepare for battle with the Egyptians. The officers were confused, given his previous reluctance, but they followed his orders, leading to their victory in the Battle of the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza The year after his invasion, Napoleon returned to Egypt, to the Great Pyramid of Giza. After discovering the Rosetta Stone—an ancient stone that helped scientists to understand how to read hieroglyphics—Napoleon began to believe that the pyramids held great mystique and spirituality. He spent the night inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, inside the king’s chamber that was about 32 feet long and 16 feet wide. For seven hours, he sat in the dark room, not emerging until sunrise. However, when he stepped out of the pyramid, his face was pale. Visibly shaken and terrified, he refused to tell anyone what he’d experienced, saying, “If I told you the truth, you would not believe me.” Even years later, when one of Napoleon’s men asked about the experience, Napoleon considered telling him but then decided against it, saying, “No, never mind” (Shkuro, 2019, para. 2). Considering Napoleon admired Alexander the Great, who had also spent the night in the king’s chambers and had an experience, some believe he may have been trying to claim a piece of Alexander’s legacy in that respect. He’s even been said to have created stories about himself that aligned with Alexander. Though, even his officers said he was clearly disturbed by whatever he saw.

Wash trading, as it was called, would have been illegal on a regulated US exchange, though the sight of it did not bother Sam all that much. He thought it was sort of funny just how brazenly many of the Asian exchanges did it. In the summer of 2019, FTX created and published a daily analysis of the activity on other exchanges. It estimated that 80 percent or more of the volume on the second- and third-tier exchanges, and 30 percent of the volume on the top few exchanges, was fake. Soon after FTX published its first analysis of crypto trading activity, one exchange called and said, We’re firing our wash trading team. Give us a week and the volumes will be real. The top exchanges expressed relief, and gratitude for the analysis, as, until then, lots of people assumed that far more than 30 percent of their volume was fake. Sam was less surprised that Binance was wash trading than by how badly they were doing it. “They were doing a B-minus job at market manipulation,” he said. One Binance bot would make a wide market in Bitcoin futures, and another Binance bot would enter and lift its high offer. If, to keep the numbers simple, the fair value of bitcoin was $100, the first Binance bot would insert a bid at $98 and an offer at $102. No normal trader would trade against either—why sell for $98 or buy for $102 on Binance what you could buy or sell on some other exchange for $100? But then, at regular and predictable intervals, the second Binance bot would enter the market and buy at $102. It looked as if a trade had occurred between two different parties, but it hadn’t. It was simply Binance buying from Binance.

And I understood that not only was I fated to see them again, searching for each other with the same looks which clearly showed that love’s fiery sphere had started to grow between them, but there was also something else, meant only for me.  Without wanting to, I had entered the realm of shadows, where you cannot be seen.  They were the only ones that could be seen, while I, until then at the centre of the story, was now drifting through the treacherous fog of strange desires, like a poor fly blown about in the wind.” (Homeric)