“
Why bother taking notice of everything going on around you, filling up your mind with irrelevant details and excess information? What’s going to happen will happen regardless. Awareness is beside the point.
”
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Iain Reid (Foe)
“
Liars fidget. The tone of their voice or speech patterns changes. Liars offer too much information, babbling on with excessive detail to convince themselves or others of what they are saying.
”
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Freida McFadden (Never Lie)
“
Matt laughed. "Close. That was last year. This year it's Obsessive Deovtion to Fourier Analysis Theory and Applications. And my personal favorite, Quantum Physics II: Romantic Entanglements of Energy and Matter."
Julie turned her head to Matt. "You're a double major? Physics and math? Jesus..."
"I know. Nerdy." He shrugged.
"No, I'm impressed. I'm just surprised your brains fit in your head."
"I was fitted with a specially desinged compression filter that allows excessive information to lie dormant until I need to access it. It's only the Beta version, so excuse any kinks that may appear. I really can't be held responsible.
”
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Jessica Park (Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1))
“
For all her few years, I saw her then as I see her now, the sanest, the most uncluttered and the most direct of beings. Her ability to ignore the excesses of information, dismiss the useless frill and uncover the heart of things was truly magical.
”
”
Fynn
“
Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.
We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?
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Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
“
We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.
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Mario Bunge (Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction (Prometheus Lectures))
“
Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“
If I had a reader and he had read all I have written so far of my adventures, there would be certainly no need to inform him that I am not created for any sort of society. The trouble is I don't know how to behave in company. If I go anywhere among a great many people I always have a feeling as though I were being electrified by so many eyes looking at me. It positively makes me shrivel up, physically shrivel up, even in such places as the theatre, to say nothing of private houses. I did not know how to behave with dignity in these gambling saloons and assemblies; I either was still, inwardly upbraiding myself for my excessive mildness and politeness, or I suddenly got up and did something rude. And meanwhile all sorts of worthless fellows far inferior to me knew how to behave with wonderful aplomb-- and that's what really exasperated me above everything, so that I lost my self-possession more and more. I may say frankly, even at that time, if the truth is to be told, the society there, and even winning money at cards, had become revolting and a torture to me. Positively a torture. I did, of course, derive acute enjoyment from it, but this enjoyment was at the cost of torture.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Adolescent (Vintage Classics))
“
Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding – revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion.
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”
James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)
“
Overstimulated. Light, sound, touch, all had been amped up. He closed his eyes to shut out the excess information and tried to get his senses to slow down.
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Carol Shay Hornung (Asperger Sunset)
“
I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.
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Gerhard Richter
“
We don't see the New Testament church hoarding the feast for themselves, gorging, getting fatter and fatter and asking for more; more bible studies, more sermons, more programs, classes, training, conferences, information, more feasting for us. At some point, the church stopped living the bible and decided just to study it, culling the feast parts and whitewashing the fast parts. We are addicted to the buffet, skillfully discarding the costly discipleship required after consuming. The feast is supposed to sustain the fast, but we go back for seconds and thirds and fourths, stuffed to the brim and fat with inactivity.
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Jen Hatmaker (7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess)
“
In the conditions of this “New World Order,” a crucial part of the contemporary world economy is a criminal economy, in which the excess profits are accumulated not by the production of material comforts, but by drug-traffic, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, including prostitution. The contemporary world economy is an economy of the global organized criminality whose eminently form is the modern capitalist state. The contemporary world economy is an economy not of the real commodity production, but an economy of the jobbery; this is expressed directly in supply and demand of the capital of the speculation, i.e., in the fictitious capital trade, in the antagonistic games with share capital in the stock exchange. Just Wall Street’s stock exchange, i.e., the world speculative capital market, is the contemporary tremendous pump for inflation of the balloons of the world economic crises, the last one of which began in 2007. The aggregate amount of the bonds on the world market, as many economists know, is over one hundred trillion US dollars! Without taking in mind the derivatives! If including those, the aggregate amount is several times more! This is an enormous balloon as inflated as a red giant star! And when added to this amount the world market of the shares, the passing each other between real and fictitious capital grows to cosmic dimensions! This cosmic balloon will burst very soon! That means the most destructive capitalist crisis in human history lies just round the corner, the global economic apocalypse is just forthcoming! This ruin will be due to the stock exchange antagonistic games, the stock exchange that is, as a matter of fact, a gambling house! Because the securities and shares’ trading is sheer gambling! This becomes clear by the direct proportionality between risk and profitability, the more risk—the more profitability, and vice versa! However, this is gambling in which the stakes are not simply money, but millions and billions of human fates. So, this is a destroying-the-civilization-world crime economy!
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Todor Bombov (Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face (A New World Order))
“
To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.
This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude.
But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.
”
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Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes)
“
Why would you want YouTube, Facebook or Netflix running in a decentralized way with no central body in charge? It eliminates the problem of excessive personal information on Facebook, or your YouTube viewing habits being monitored and marketed to.
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Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
“
Cult (totalistic type): a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressure, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.
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Louis Jolyon West
“
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.
There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
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”
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
“
To combat the excess of information, you have to focus on what is key to your project and leave everything else out.
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Héctor García (Ikigai Journey: A Practical Guide to Finding Happiness and Purpose the Japanese Way)
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Excessive information creates its own form of blindness to what is actually going on.
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Alexander Chancellor (Sometimes in America and a life in a year at the new yorker)
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Anxious to repay the passenger’s excessive generosity, or at least not to be indebted in terms of words, he offers additional information that no one wants, and expressions of gratitude that no one heeds.
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José Saramago (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis)
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A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.
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Iain M. Banks (Excession (Culture, #5))
“
If you lack open communication and honesty in your life – It’s time to look within. Are you someone who handles heavy, emotional, or tough information well or do you often get excessively agitated, upset, or depressed? My rule of thumb is that no topic ‘should’ ever be off limits with a loved one. That is the goal to work towards. The point being, if you’re easy to talk to, people will talk to you! If you’re not, then they won’t!
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Alaric Hutchinson (Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life)
“
I was fitted with a specially designed compression filter that allows excessive information to lie dormant until I need to access it. It’s only the beta version, so excuse any kinks that may appear. I really can’t be held responsible.
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Jessica Park (Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1))
“
He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe... This fear he slavishly obeys... For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world... It is like a general informing his soliders that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not so awfully solumn things. In a world where we are certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
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William James (The Will to Believe, Human Immortality and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy)
“
In the middle of a negotiation, what they planned to ask for suddenly seems ridiculous, excessive, too much. If this happens to you, hold on tight to the information you’ve collected, and don’t suddenly revise your goals downward. Focus on your target and fight the impulse to concede too quickly. After all your hard work, don’t make the mistake of walking away too soon.
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Linda Babcock (Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want)
“
You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they're immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck's sake defense. [...] As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, "An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness".
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Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
“
I have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about. Of course, being an optimist doesn’t guarantee you an unrelievedly happy life. You can still lose your job on the same day that your house burns down and your spouse informs you that he or she has shot the sheriff. But the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place.
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Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
“
A less drastic obstacle to experiencing flow is excessive self-consciousness. A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment. So are people who are excessively self-centered. A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to her desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; a man or a woman who cannot advance one’s interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
“
by an active participant in political campaigns against the excesses of the mining industry, rather than by a neutral observer. Instead of jeopardizing access to key informants and events, engagement with these issues has provided me with an insider perspective on the interactions between corporations and their critics. It has offered new sites for ethnographic observation, new questions for research, and new perspectives on the corporation.
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Stuart Kirsch (Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics)
“
It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
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William James (The Collected Works of William James)
“
neuropharmacologist Franz Vollenweider observes . . . A fundamental feature of information processing dysfunction in psychosis is the inability of these patients to screen out, inhibit, filter, or gate extraneous stimuli and to attend selectively to salient features of the environment. Gating deficits may cause these subjects to become overloaded with excessive exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli, which in turn could lead to a breakdown in cognitive integrity and difficulty in distinguishing self from nonself.4
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
“
Soba noodles with eggplant and mango This dish has become my mother’s ultimate cook-to-impress fare. And she is not the only one, as I have been informed by many readers. It is the refreshing nature of the cold buckwheat noodles the sweet sharpness of the dressing and the muskiness of mango that make it so pleasing. Serve this as a substantial starter or turn it into a light main course by adding some fried firm tofu. Serves 6 1/2 cup rice vinegar 3 tbsp sugar 1/2 tsp salt 2 garlic cloves, crushed 1/2 fresh red chile, finely chopped 1 tsp toasted sesame oil grated zest and juice of 1 lime 1 cup sunflower oil 2 eggplants, cut into 3/4-inch dice 8 to 9 oz soba noodles 1 large ripe mango, cut into 3/8-inch dice or into 1/4-inch-thick strips 12/3 cup basil leaves, chopped (if you can get some use Thai basil, but much less of it) 21/2 cups cilantro leaves, chopped 1/2 red onion, very thinly sliced In a small saucepan gently warm the vinegar, sugar and salt for up to 1 minute, just until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat and add the garlic, chile and sesame oil. Allow to cool, then add the lime zest and juice. Heat up the sunflower oil in a large pan and shallow-fry the eggplant in three or four batches. Once golden brown remove to a colander, sprinkle liberally with salt and leave there to drain. Cook the noodles in plenty of boiling salted water, stirring occasionally. They should take 5 to 8 minutes to become tender but still al dente. Drain and rinse well under running cold water. Shake off as much of the excess water as possible, then leave to dry on a dish towel. In a mixing bowl toss the noodles with the dressing, mango, eggplant, half of the herbs and the onion. You can now leave this aside for 1 to 2 hours. When ready to serve add the rest of the herbs and mix well, then pile on a plate or in a bowl.
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Yotam Ottolenghi (Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi)
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Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently.
At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein.
Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms:
1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...]
2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...]
3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.
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James Montier (The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy)
“
Replace Behaviors That Make Your Rumination and Worry Worse
There’s not much point in using strategies to decrease rumination and worry if you’re concurrently adding fuel to those fires. Self-criticism is one kind of fuel. Other types of fuel include things like excessive reassurance seeking, spending hours looking up health information online, or compulsively looking at your ex’s Facebook page.
Look out for behaviors that seem to provide a temporary reprieve from anxiety but, in fact, make you feel like you need to go back and repeat them. Look into seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist if you can’t stop those behaviors on your own.
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Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
“
ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric illnesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment.
Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteristics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.
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Bruce M. Carruthers
“
We are in shifting circumstances in which nothing is hidden and everything is mobile - a world of a quite new kind of innocence, but a world no longer illuminated by the utopian constellation of secrecy. The individual is less alienated by the fact that everything is known about him than by the fact that he is called upon to know everything about himself. In this demand lies the principle of a new and irreversible servitude.
There is much more to be hoped for in an excess of information or of weapons than in the restriction of information or arms control. Da, wo die Gefahr wiichst, wiichst das Rettende auch.[But where there is danger, there grows! Also what saves.' (HoIderlin)].
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
“
Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
“
have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about. Of course, being an optimist doesn’t guarantee you an unrelievedly happy life. You can still lose your job on the same day that your house burns down and your spouse informs you that he or she has shot the sheriff. But the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place.
”
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Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
“
I have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about. Of course, being an optimist doesn’t guarantee you an unrelievedly happy life. You can still lose your job on the same day that your house burns down and your spouse informs you that he or she has shot the sheriff. But the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place. As
”
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Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
“
Surround Yourself with Others Who Are Already Doing What You Want to Do
My all-time favorite success tip for people who tend to hesitate excessively is to regularly interact with people who are already successfully doing what you want to do. Why will this help you moderate your tortoise tendencies? Emotions, thoughts, and behaviors all tend to be socially contagious. Therefore, if you surround yourself with people who are already acting in the ways you need to act, this will likely rub off on you. You’ll be more likely to take action.
Another key reason for interacting with others who are already succeeding in your field is that many of the key pieces of information that will help you succeed won’t be shared in books or other public forums. They’re likely passed from person to person. You’ll get to know these insider secrets only by befriending successful people.
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Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
“
Most of the time we have solely our thoughts as meager substitutes for our instinctual drives. We not only put a lot of energy into our thoughts, but we also frequently confuse them with reality; we come to believe erroneously, as did Descartes, that we are our thoughts. Thoughts, unfortunately, are poor surrogates for experienced aliveness, and when disconnected from feelings, they result in corrosive rumination, fantasy, delusion and excessive worry. Such perseveration is not really surprising, as the paranoid tendency toward concern for potential threat in the face of ambiguity might have had a significant adaptive advantage in earlier times. Now, however, it is the currency of our judgmental, negativistic “superegos.” On the other hand, when we are informed by clear body sensations and feelings, worry is diminished, while creativity and a sense of purpose are enhanced.
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Peter A. Levine (In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness)
“
[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated.
Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired.
Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one.
These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed.
Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society.
In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional.
Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.
”
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Christopher Michael Langan
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Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. The individual is aware of the irrationality but loses all power to act in their own interest. Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. These narratives are inherently simplifications, because no one story can account for everything that's happening; the world is too complex for simple stories. Instead of accepting this, the stories become ever more baroque and bifurcated, ever more convoluted and open-ended. Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding - revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion.
”
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James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)
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Streamline Your Focus Instead of Jumping From Unfinished Project to Unfinished Project
Although it seems contradictory, anxiety-related perfectionism can cause people to persist too long on some tasks and leave other projects unfinished. Perfectionists who are intolerant of uncertainty often jump from project to project. They might start multiple business plans, grant proposals, job applications, movie scripts, stand-up routines, craft projects, or novels, and not finish any of them. They may sour quickly on an idea when their self-doubt starts to creep in rather than stay with the idea long enough to realistically judge it’s potential.
If you bounce from idea to idea, it could very well be because it’s hard for you to tolerate your uncertainty about whether the idea you’re working on is going to pan out. If you have a habit of not finishing things, you’re likely to be better off sticking with a project and finishing it, instead of jumping to another project when you start to feel unsure.
To help you be less tempted to jump around, reduce your exposure to excessive information and alternatives.
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Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)
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In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Henry George is strong when he portrays the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for his remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property.
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Rutherford B. Hayes (Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States (1922))
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Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093).
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Don’t worry,” he said flippantly, taking her arm and starting to walk back toward the house. “I’m not going to make the ritualistic proposal that followed our last encounters. Marriage is out of the question. Among other things, I’m fresh out of large rubies and expensive furs this season.”
Despite his joking tone, Elizabeth felt ill at how ugly those words sounded now, even though her reasons for saying them at the time had nothing to do with a desire for jewels or furs. You had to give him credit, she decided miserably, because he obviously took no offense at it. Evidently, in sophisticated flirtations, the rule was that no one took anything seriously.
“Who’s the leading contender these days?” he asked in that same light tone as the cottage came into view. “There must be more than Belhaven and Marchman.”
Elizabeth struggled valiantly to make the same transition from heated passion to flippancy that he seemed to find so easy. She wasn’t quite so successful, however, and her light tone was threaded with confusion. “In my uncle’s eyes, the leading contender is whoever has the most important title, followed by the most money.”
“Of course,” he said dryly. “In which case it sounds as if Marchman may be the lucky man.”
His utter lack of caring made Elizabeth’s heart squeeze in an awful, inexplicable way. Her chin lifted in self-defense. “Actually, I’m not in the market for a husband,” she informed him, trying to sound as indifferent and as amused as he. “I may have to marry someone if I can’t continue to outmaneuver my uncle, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d like to marry a much older man than I.”
“Preferably a blind one,” he said sardonically, “who’ll not notice a little affair now and then?”
“I meant,” she informed him with a dark glance, “that I want my freedom. Independence. And that is something a young husband isn’t likely to give me, while an elderly one might.”
“Independence is all an old man will be able to give you,” Ian said blntly.
“That’s quite enough,” she said. “I’m excessively tired of being forever pushed about by the men in my life. I’d like to care for Havenhurst and do as I wish to do.”
“Marry an old man,” Ian interjected smoothly, “and you may be the last of the Camerons.”
She looked at him blankly.
“He won’t be able to give you children.”
“Oh, that,” Elizabeth said, feeling a little defeated and nonplussed. “I haven’t been able to work that out yet.”
“Let me know when you do,” Ian replied with biting sarcasm. “There’s a fortune to be made from a discovery like that one.
”
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Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
People today are used to seeing not only the incredible but the impossible as well, all provided by the mega-pixel. We witness miracles and dismiss them as diversions. The line between reality and fantasy has been blurred to the point that we no longer know what it is we see, and so put little faith in the experience. And there is no darkness anymore, no place for things like mystery and magic to make their abode. There is nothing nowadays that is not exposed, caught on camera and pixilated to be stored and classified forever in some phantom zone called cyber space. Nothing is too small to remain unseen by our microscopes or too far away to be seen by our satellites. The world is a strumpet, every inch of her exposed and explored. Whether she is thrusting herself into the camera's gaze, or we as voyeurs intrude upon her most intimate moments, nothing is left to the imagination. The world today is all light and no darkness. But too much light can blind. An excess of it deprives our eyes from the necessary contrast required to give definition to what we see. The light precludes magic, gives us explanations in its place. It denies love and informs us of the chemicals in the brain that are active given certain conditions. We have gained knowledge but in the process we have been forced to surrender the very reasons we sought knowledge in the first place.
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James Rozoff
“
Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman
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John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
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This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth. The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one perpetuated by the Islanders themselves, for as Dickens observed after his visit to this country, “These Americans do love a scoundrel.” Because his informants tend to imagine that the darkest interpretation is the one the writer wishes to hear, the popular accounts (until now, there have been no others) are invariably sensational as well as speculative: the hard facts, not to speak of “truth,” are missing. Also, this “Bloody Watson” material relates only to his final years in southwest Florida; one rarely encounters any reference to South Carolina, where Edgar Artemas Watson passed his boyhood, nor to the years in the Indian Country (always excepting his alleged role in the slaying of Belle Starr), nor even to the Fort White district of Columbia County in north Florida where he farmed in early manhood, married all three of his wives, and spent almost half of the fifty-five years of his life.
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Peter Matthiessen (Shadow Country)
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The cessation of art is something that can only be accomplished when art disappears into its own excess. And that occasion, according to Baudrillard, has already happened. In fact, "art" disappeared a while back (When? Sometimes in the 70's, probably, when information technologies were electrified and became the dominant way in which Western cultures mediated its self-expressions), and its sublimations into the everyday order of simulation was overlooked. Too busy watching reruns of I dream of Jeannie or betwitched I suppose. What is called "art" now is itself a continuous rerun, a rerun of the image of its own disappearance. But said another way, which I'm sure some would rather it be said (though it makes no difference) art is everywhere one and the same with the image of the everyday, if not actually, then potentially. Under these circumstances, because art and the reality that is supposed to set off aesthetic properties have lost their operational difference, unmusic is everywhere Music is not. However, according to the logic of simulation, Music is everywhere so unmusic is nowhere. Yet being everywhere is the same as being nowhere, therefore Music is nowhere, which makes unmusic everywhere. But this is hyperreality and hyperreality trucks no difference between the real and the unreal (artifice), the musical and the unmusical. Thus unmusic eschews Adorno's dialectical impasse to the extent that it is total nonsense, a byproduct of the hyperreal that supervenes a discourse of contradictions and paradoxes where everything is coming up signs.
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Eldritch Priest (Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure)
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A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
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Geoffrey Hosking (The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within)
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Inflation is not caused by increasing the fiduciary circulation. It begins on the day when the purchaser is obliged to pay, for the same goods, a higher sum than that asked the day before. At that point, one must intervene. Even to Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps. The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key. I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation.
I do not entertain the illusion that I can pay for everything out of my available funds. Simply, I've read a lot, and I've known how to profit by the experience of events in the past. Frederick the Great, already, had gradually withdrawn his devaluated thalers from circulation, and had thus re established the value of his currency.
All these things are simple and natural. The only thing is, one mustn't let the Jew stick his nose in. The basis of Jewish commercial policy is to make matters incomprehensible for a normal brain. People go into ecstasies of confidence before the science of the great economists. Anyone who doesn't understand is taxed with ignorance! At bottom, the only object of all these notions is to throw everything into confusion.
The very simple ideas that happen to be mine have nowadays penetrated into the flesh and blood of millions. Only the professors don't understand that the value of money depends on the goods behind that money.
One day I received some workers in the great hall at Obersalzberg, to give them an informal lecture on money. The good chaps understood me very well, and rewarded me with a storm of applause.
To give people money is solely a problem of making paper. The whole question is to know whether the workers are producing goods to match the paper that's made. If work does not increase, so that production remains at the same level, the extra money they get won't enable them to buy more things than they bought before with less money.
Obviously, that theory couldn't have provided the material for a learned dissertation. For a distinguished economist, the thing is, no matter what you're talking about, to pour out ideas in complicated meanderings and to use terms of Sibylline incomprehensibility.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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My eyes widened at that offer. I’d missed riding since coming to the Academy and I hadn’t really thought I’d be able to get out again any time soon. But I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know quite how much this meant to me. Every other piece of information the Heirs had gotten on me up until now had been twisted against me in some way and I didn’t want them trying to take this from me too.
“I’m not really dressed for it,” I said slowly though in all honesty I had no issue with tying my dress in a knot around my waist if that was what it took to get me out on the road.
“I’m sure I could lend you my shirt if you want to take it off,” he replied.
“That would require both of us taking off rather a lot of our clothes.” There was a dare hanging in the air between us and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to resist it much longer.
I eyed the line up of bikes, my heart beating a little faster as I tried to decide which one I’d choose.
In all honesty I was too drunk to ride, although the sandwich was mopping up some of the excess alcohol and I was feeling a little less dizzy... It still wouldn’t have been the best idea though.
“Why do you have the same bikes that that they have in the mortal world?” I asked as I began to wander between the immaculate machines. Some of the badges were different, I read names like Yamaharpy, Sphinxzuki, Hondusa, Harley Dragonson and I couldn’t keep the smirk from my lips but the actual bikes were definitely mortal models.
“There are several permanent rifts between our world and the mortal world where we import all sorts of goods like these. The importers like to change the names as a kind of in-joke but a hell of a lot of our products come straight out of Taiwan or China, direct to Solaria,” Darius explained.
“Why?” I asked. “Can’t Fae invent their own bikes and cars?”
“I guess we could... but why bother? We’ve got better things to do with our time and it makes sense to use the mortals like our own personal goods suppliers. The Fae they deal with even manage to Coerce the best prices for everything we import. No Fae vendor would create any of the things we desire so cheaply.” Darius folded his arms and leaned back to perch on the saddle of a stunning green bike as he watched my exploration.
“So you basically abuse the mortals with your power?” I asked.
“We use our power to take what we want from them,” he agreed. “Just the same as we do with other Fae.”
He had a point there; Fae were equally asshole-like to their own kind.
(Tory)
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Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
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This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago.
And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017).
These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.
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Vaclav Smil (Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (Mit Press))
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Consider also James 4:17. “Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.” Few of us can claim ignorance about good nutrition. With so many resources available, we have some idea what healthy eating looks like. We certainly have access to information about what is unhealthy. For instance, most of us know the dangers of fast food and desserts, but we eat them in excess in the name of convenience. We know eating leafy green vegetables is healthier than eating french fries and fresh fruit is better for us than processed sugary desserts.
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Sheri Summers Hunt (The Oldest Sin in the Book)
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The human brain likes anything that entails a great amount of information. Its excessive capacity waits eagerly to perceive the world by completely exhausting its great receptive powers. That potential power, though, remains today in a state of extreme constriction and is a source of the information stress we're all under.
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Kenya Hara (Designing Design)
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More of America’s problems than even DJ had imagined could be better understood and addressed with better access to the right information. The problem of excessive police force was another example. After a white policeman shot a defenseless black man in Ferguson, Missouri, the White House convened police chiefs from ten American cities, along with their data. The policing data was local and difficult to get ahold of—and that was DJ’s point. He wanted to show what might be possible if the government collected the information. “We asked the question: What causes excessive use of police force?” Combing the data from the ten cities, a team of researchers from several American universities found a pattern that would be hard to spot with the naked eye. Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation—a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved—were more likely to use excessive force. Maybe the problem wasn’t as simple as a bad cop. Maybe it was the emotional state in which the cop had found himself. “Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,” said DJ. “Give them a break in between and maybe they behave differently.
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Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk)
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As the story goes, the manuscript that formed the outlines of Wiener’s contributions to information theory was nearly lost to humanity. Wiener had entrusted the manuscript to Walter Pitts, a graduate student, who had checked it as baggage for a trip from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Boston. Pitts forgot to retrieve the baggage. Realizing his mistake, he asked two friends to pick up the bag. They either ignored or forgot the request. Only five months later was the manuscript finally tracked down; it had been labeled “unclaimed property” and cast aside in a coatroom. Wiener was, understandably, blind with rage. “Under these circumstances please consider me as completely dissociated from your future career,” he wrote to Pitts. He complained to one administrator of the “total irresponsibleness of the boys” and to another faculty member that the missing parcel meant that he had “lost priority on some important work.” “One of my competitors, Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company, is coming out with a paper before mine,” he fumed. Wiener wasn’t being needlessly paranoid: Shannon had, by that point, previewed his still-unpublished work at 1947 conferences at Harvard and Columbia. In April 1947, Wiener and Shannon shared the same stage, and both had the opportunity to present early versions of their thoughts. Wiener, in a moment of excessive self-regard, would write to a colleague, “The Bell people are fully accepting my thesis concerning statistics and communications engineering.
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Jimmy Soni (A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age)
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The best way to rein in the excesses of the complex—and make us safer—is for well-informed voters to elect the kind of enlightened leaders we need to bring about change. Eisenhower’s advice, delivered in 1961, still rings true today: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
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James McCartney (America's War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts)
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regulations or restrictions on entry into the banking business. Private banks took deposits and issued their own private currencies backed by gold bullion. As Professor Lawrence White has documented, this system worked well. It was more stable, with less inflation than the more heavily regulated and politicized system of banking and money employed in England during the same period.21 Michael Prowse of the Financial Times summarized Scotland’s free-banking experience: “There was little fraud. There was no evidence of over-issue of notes. Banks did not typically hold either excessive or inadequate reserves. Bank runs were rare and not contagious. The free banks commanded the respect of citizens and provided a sound foundation for economic growth that outpaced that in England for most of the period.”22
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James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
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Self-justification
Modern man needs a relation to facts, a self-justification to convince himself that by acting in a certain way he is obeying reason and proved experience. We must therefore study the close relationship between information and propaganda. Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda text leads ultimately to less conviction and participation than does a more "informative" and reasonable text on the same subject. A large dose of fear precipitates immediate action; a reasonably small dose produces lasting support. The listener's critical power decreases if the propaganda message is more rational and less violent.
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Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes)
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The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich)
“
The cause of health problems essentially lies in a lack of energy and information in one part of the energy system that corresponds to an overactivity in other parts. The principle of this qigong is that you use the excess energy from the system to nurture the deficient system.
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Ricardo B Serrano
“
But even the most powerful desires are just feelings-coated information. They are simply messages, suggestions that can be followed or ignored. We can choose our reaction. For example, should you find yourself going towards the fridge for a binge, the very moment you notice your body reacting with movement… stop moving. Stand completely still. Realize that your thoughts cannot make you move. Realize your body is totally unaffected. The urge to binge is powerless unless you act on it. You may feel waves or a compulsion to binge, but they cannot make you move. You have the power. You are not your thoughts, you are not your desires. You are the strong silent one underneath it all. The zen one.
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Alison C. Kerr (The Binge Code: 7 Unconventional Keys to End Binge Eating and Lose Excess Weight)
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Zen is Buddhism made simple again. The robes worn by Zen priests are plain black affairs (unlike the colorful getups favored by the Tibetans and their other Buddhist cousins), and even after receiving Transmission, the Zen master's daily dress is a dull brown robe. You can sit anywhere; Dogen Zenji said that the heart is the real zendo. This informs temple architecture. Plainness here is neither false humility nor a facade. It is true to the bone. Skeletal beams and rafters are seamlessly joined; they are not nailed or screwed into place; they are made to fit together. Inside a zendo, there is mostly open space, dimly lit, with a small central altar and a tan, a two-foot-high wooden platform built around the perimeter, where meditators sit on plain black cushions, facing the wall. There are few ceremonial objects—the teacher's staff, a stick of incense burning in a bowl—and it is rare to run into more than one or two bronze or wooden Buddhas. Zen rituals are spare, too. Music is reduced to an isolated ding or bong of a bell, the flat report of a mallet tapped against a slab of wood, and a thrumming bang from a giant bass drum. Even the chanting is monochromatic; students pitch their voices toward the deep, dark end of the register and grumble in unison.
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Michael Downing (Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center)
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Liars offer too much information, babbling on with excessive detail to convince themselves or others of what they are saying.
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Freida McFadden (Never Lie)
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Economics and P&L What are the per-unit economics of the device? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit? What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product? How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on? For this section of the PR/FAQ, ideally one or more members of your finance team will work with you to understand and capture these costs so you can include a simplified table of the per-unit economics and a mini P&L in the document. A resourceful entrepreneur or product manager can do this work themselves if they do not have a finance manager or team. For new products, the up-front investment is a major consideration. In the case of Melinda, there is a requirement for 77 people to work on the hardware and software, for an annualized cost of roughly $15 million. This means that the product idea needs to have the potential to earn well in excess of $15 million per year in gross profit to be worth building. The consumer questions and economic analysis both have an effect on the product price point, and that price point, in turn, has an effect on the size of the total addressable market. Price is a key variable in the authoring of your PR/FAQ. There may be special assumptions or considerations that have informed your calculation of the price point—perhaps making it relatively low or unexpectedly high—that need to be called out and explained. Some of the best new product proposals set a not-to-exceed price point because it forces the team to innovate within that constraint and face the tough trade-offs early on. The problem(s) associated with achieving that price point should be fully explained and explored in the FAQ.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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Bullies use various power tactics, such as spreading malicious gossip, excessive criticism, withholding resources or information, excluding a targeted person from the group, and other devious behaviors intended to undermine the confidence and performance of others. Bullies often take aggressive action against individuals in an effort to control and have power over them.
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Alex Pattakos (Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work)
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As a result of these legal actions, “defensive medicine” is being practiced. Defensive medicine involves the ordering of a multitude of tests, regardless of their medical necessity or expense. Therefore, if a malpractice suit is filed, the physician cannot be accused of failure to obtain all “relevant” diagnostic information. Defensive medicine is a poor practice of medicine, as it is excessively expensive and invites iatrogenic disease. Thus the legal profession, due to its own lucrative role in malpractice suits, helps to perpetuate this vicious cycle.
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Herbert Benson (The Mind Body Effect: How to Counteract the Harmful Effects of Stress)
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ADD may be present. Since everybody will answer “yes” to some number of questions, and since we have not established norms for this questionnaire, it should only be used as an informal gauge. 1. Are you left-handed or ambidextrous? 2. Do you have a family history of drug or alcohol abuse, depression, or manic-depressive illness? 3. Are you moody? 4. Were you considered an underachiever in school? Now? 5. Do you have trouble getting started on things? 6. Do you drum your fingers a lot, tap your feet, fidget, or pace? 7. When you read, do you find that you often have to reread a paragraph or an entire page because you are daydreaming? 8. Do you tune out or space out a lot? 9. Do you have a hard time relaxing? 10. Are you excessively impatient? 11. Do you find that you undertake many projects simultaneously so that your life often resembles a juggler who’s got six more balls in the air than he can handle? 12. Are you impulsive? 13. Are you easily distracted? 14. Even if you are easily distracted, do you find that there are times when your power of concentration is laser-beam intense? 15. Do you procrastinate chronically? 16. Do you often get excited by projects and then not follow through? 17. More than most people, do you feel that it is hard for you to make yourself understood? 18. Is your memory so porous that if you go from one room to the next to get something, by the time you get to the next room you’ve sometimes forgotten what you were looking for? 19. Do you smoke cigarettes? 20. Do you drink too much? 21. If you have ever tried cocaine, did you find that it helped you focus and calmed you down, rather than making you high? 22. Do you change the radio station in your car frequently? 23. Do you wear out your TV remote-control switch by changing stations frequently? 24. Do you feel driven, as if an engine inside you won’t slow down? 25. As a kid, were you called words like, “a daydreamer,” “lazy,” “a spaceshot,” “impulsive,” “disruptive,” “lazy,” or just plain “bad”?
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Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
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If civilians are present on the battlefield, disproportionate attacks that violate proportionality are possible. The legal standard is whether “a reasonably well-informed person in the circumstances of the actual perpetrator, making reasonable use of the information available to him or her, could have expected excessive civilian casualties to result from the attack.”200
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Solis (The Law of Armed Conflict)
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A friend who lives in Micronesia told me that the inhabitants of one of the islands of Polynesia were given refrigerators by a group of visiting, well-intentioned missionaries. They had noticed that the locals, who were subsistence fishermen, had to fish every day because any excess catch spoiled in the tropical heat. The missionaries thought it would be a blessing if excess fish could be refrigerated, allowing the fishermen to put their attention to other wealth-generating activities. On a return visit a year later, the missionaries noticed that there was no trace of the refrigerators in the community. Their inquiries informed them that the elders had ordered all the equipment dumped in the ocean. The reason? Refrigerating excess fish meant that surplus was no longer given to the elderly or infirm, as had been their custom for a thousand years. It was unacceptable to the tribe that "progress" resulted in more wealth for some and hunger for others.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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Short-term thinking – Focusing on what matters at the moment, rather than on potential consequences over the long term. Socialization – An element of a monologue that is designed to encourage a person to share truthful information by suggesting that the activity under investigation is one that is regularly engaged in by others. Stimulus – The question that prompts a behavioral response. Throat-clearing/swallowing – A nonverbal deceptive behavior in which a person clears his throat or performs a significant swallow prior to answering the question. Timing – The guideline in our deception detection model dictating that the initial deceptive behavior must begin within the first five seconds after the stimulus. Transition statement – Statement made by the questioner to allow for a transparent transition from an interview to an interrogation. It is the first sentence or two of the monologue, and takes the form of a direct observation of concern (DOC) or a direct observation of guilt (DOG). Unintended message – A truthful statement made by a deceptive person that, when the literal meaning of the statement is analyzed, conveys information that the person does not realize he’s conveying. We also refer to this as “truth in the lie.” Vague question – A question to be avoided because it allows for excessive latitude in
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Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)
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In the last few years, we’ve learned that the formation and maintenance of categories have their roots in known biological processes in the brain. Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don’t just lead to learning—the connections are the learning. The number of possible brain states that each of us can have is so large that it exceeds the number of known particles in the universe. The implications of this are mind-boggling: Theoretically, you should be able to represent uniquely in your brain every known particle in the universe, and have excess capacity left over to organize those particles into finite categories. Your brain is just the tool for the information age.
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Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
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What’s more, when Grant plotted total revenue over the three months against employees’ scores on the 1-to-7 scale, he found a distinct, and revealing, pattern. Indeed, revenue peaked between 4 and 4.5—and fell off as the personality moved toward either the introvert or extravert pole. Those highest in extraversion fared scarcely better than those highest in introversion, but both lagged behind their coworkers in the modulated middle.31 “These findings call into question the longstanding belief that the most productive salespeople are extraverted,” Grant writes.32 Instead, being too extraverted can actually impair performance, as other research has begun to confirm. For example, two recent Harvard Business Review studies of sales professionals found that top performers are less gregarious than below-average ones and that the most sociable salespeople are often the poorest performers of all.33 According to a large study of European and American customers, the “most destructive” behavior of salespeople wasn’t being ill-informed. It was an excess of assertiveness and zeal that led to contacting customers too frequently.34 Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others’ perspectives. They can fail to strike the proper balance between asserting and holding back, which can be read as pushy and drive people away.* The answer, though, isn’t to lurch to the opposite side of the spectrum. Introverts have their own, often reverse, challenges. They can be too shy to initiate and too timid to close. The best approach is for the people on the ends to emulate those in the center. As some have noted, introverts are “geared to inspect,” while extraverts are “geared to respond.”35 Selling of any sort—whether traditional sales or non-sales selling—requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up. Their wider repertoires allow them to achieve harmony with a broader range of people and a more varied set of circumstances. Ambiverts are the best movers because they’re the most skilled attuners. For most of you, this should be welcome news. Look again at the shape of the curve in that second chart. That’s pretty much what the distribution of introverts and extraverts looks like in the wider population.36 A few of us are extraverts. A few of us are introverts. But most of us are ambiverts, sitting near the middle, not the edges, happily attuned to those around us. In some sense, we are born to sell.
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Daniel H. Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others)
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The thing is, there’s generally no consequence for bad police behavior, even repeated or serially bad behavior. Even if individual officers are successfully sued, the only thing that happens is that the city’s corporation counsel pays out some cash, and life just goes on as before. An officer’s record of complaints or settlements isn’t listed publicly. A defense lawyer who wants to find out if the officer who arrested his client has ever, say, bounced an old lady’s head off a sidewalk or lied to a judge about witnessing a drug sale has to meet an extraordinary legal standard to get access to that info.
In order to look at an officer’s record, you have to file what’s called a “Gissendanner motion,” the term referring to a 1979 case, People v. Gissendanner. In that case, a woman in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit was busted in a sting cocaine sale by a pair of undercover police. The court in that case held that the defendant isn’t entitled to subpoena the records of arresting officers willy-nilly, but that you needed a “factual predicate” to look for records of, say, excessive force or entrapment. In other words, you already need to know what you’re looking for before you find it.
What this all boils down to is, if you really feel like it, you can definitely sue the New York City Police Department. Since so much of what they do happens on the street, in front of witnesses, you might very well even win. But even if you win, there’s not necessarily any consequence. The corporation counsel’s office doesn’t call up senior police officials after lawsuits and say, “Hey, you’ve got to get rid of these three meatheads in the Seventy-Eighth Precinct we keep paying out settlements for.” In fact, when there are successful lawsuits, individual officers typically aren’t even informed of it.
What makes this so luridly fascinating is that this system is the exact inverse of the no-jail, all-settlement system of justice that governs too-big-to-fail companies like HSBC. Big banks get caught committing crimes, at worst they pay a big fine. Instead of going to jail, a check gets written, and it comes out of the pockets of shareholders, not the individuals responsible.
Here it’s the same thing. Police make bad arrests, a settlement comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket, but the officer himself never even hears about it. He doesn’t have to pay a dime. And life goes on as before.
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Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
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The water stands so high in the paths that I cannot walk dryshod, and I found in the large bougas or prairies in front, that it lay knee deep, so I sent on two men to go to the first villages of Matipa for large canoes to navigate the Lake, or give us a guide to go east to the Chambezé, to go round on foot. It was Halima who informed on Chirango, as he offered her beads for a cloth of a kind which she knew had not hitherto been taken out of the baggage. This was so far faithful in her, but she has an outrageous tongue. I remain because of an excessive hæmorrhagic discharge. [We cannot but believe Livingstone saw great danger in these constant recurrences of his old disorder: we find a trace of it in the solemn reflections which he wrote in his pocket-book, immediately under the above words:—] If the good Lord gives me favour, and permits me to finish my work, I shall thank and bless Him, though it has cost me untold toil, pain, and travel; this trip has made my hair all grey.
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David Livingstone (The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death: 1869-1873)
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Los Angeles—the dream-making capital of the world—serves as the backdrop for a number of the stories I recount. Some readers who cut their teeth in the urban centers of Europe or on the East Coast of America may prefer to dismiss what happens in Los Angeles as from a place apart, the aberrations of a migrant’s city within a migrant land. Such sentiments are understandable. Awash in the solar energy of a subtropical paradise, Los Angelinos engage life in the moment. The pace is fast, the music loud, and money is on display. Part of me, too, would prefer to dismiss such an existence as a mythmaker’s parody. But the place is real. In its immediacy and in its magnification of the familiar, Los Angeles creates its own reality and in so doing offers a “fast-forward” simulation of our collective future as a migrant culture. As Americans we must now decide whether such a future is of our choice, and whether it is sustainable. In the pages that follow, it is my goal to help inform that choice. Will we learn as a people to constructively channel the opportunities and individual enticements of the Fast New World toward an equitable social order, as Adam Smith had envisioned, or will the material demand for economic growth continue to erode the microcultures and intimate social bonds that are the hallmark of our humanity and the keys to health and personal happiness? Have the goals of America’s original social experiment been hijacked by its commercial success, threatening the delicate dance between individual desire and social responsibility, or will the nation in its migrant wisdom effectively apply its market and military dominance to remain a “beacon of hope,” enhancing the well-being of all the world’s peoples? This is a critical time in America, a time for careful thought and diligent action, for we have discovered in our commercial success that in an open society the real enemy is the self-interest that begins with a healthy appetite for life and mushrooms into manic excess during affluent times. Americans are again in the vanguard of human experience, and the world is watching. It is again a time for choosing.
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Peter C. Whybrow (American Mania: When More is Not Enough)
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PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS
Columbia law professor David Pozen contends that democracies need to be leaky-leaks and whistleblowing are themselves security mechanisms against an overreaching government. In his view, leaks serve as a counterpoint to the trend of overclassification and, ultimately as a way for governments to win back the trust lost through excessive secrecy.
Ethnographer danah boyd has called whistleblowing the civil disobedience of the information age; it enables individuals to fight back against abuse by the powerful. The NGO Human Rights Watch wrote that "those who disclose official wrongdoing...perform an important service in a democratic society...."
In this way of thinking, whistleblowers provide another oversight mechanism. You can think of them as a random surprise inspection. Just as we have laws to protect corporate whistleblowers, we need laws to protect government whistleblowers. Once they are in place, we could create a framework and rules for whistleblowing legally.
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Bruce Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World)
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o resume: 2 It is often said—and even more often screamed at anti–gay marriage rallies outside the statehouse in Lansing—that I created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. 3 Wrong. 4 Now will I tell the story of the first man, Adam; and of the companion I fashioned for him, Steve; and of the great closeting that befell their relationship. 5 For after I created the earth, and sea, and every plant and seed and beast of the field and fowl of the air, and had the place pretty much set up, I saw that it was good; 6 But I also saw, that by way of oversight it made administrative sense to establish a new middle-managerial position. 7 So as my final act of Day Six, I formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed life into his nostrils; and I called him Adam, to give him a leg up alphabetically. 8 And lo, I made him for my image; not in my image, but for my image; because with Creations thou never gettest a second chance to make a first impression; 9 And so in fashioning him I sought to make not only a responsible planetary caretaker, but also an attractive, likeable spokesman who in the event of environmental catastrophe could project a certain warmth. 10 To immediately assess his ability to function in my absence, I decided to change my plans; for I had intended to use Day Seven to infuse the universe with an innate sense of compassion and moral justice; but instead I left him in charge and snoozed. 11 And Adam passed my test; yea, he was by far my greatest achievement; he befriended all my creatures, and named them, and cared for them; and tended the Garden most skillfully; for he had a great eye for landscape design. 12 But I soon noticed he felt bereft in his solitude; for oft he sighed, and pined for a helpmeet; and furthermore he masturbated incessantly, until he had well-nigh besplattered paradise. 13 So one night I caused him to fall into a deep sleep; fulsomely did I roofie his nectar; and as he slept, I removed a rib, though not a load-bearing one. 14 And from this rib I fashioned a companion for him; a hunk, unburdened by excess wisdom; ripped, and cut, and hung like unto a fig tree before the harvest; 15 Yea, and a power bottom. 16 And Adam arose, and saw him, and wept for joy; and he called the man Steve; I had suggested Steven, but Adam liked to keep things informal. 17 And Adam and Steve were naked, and felt no shame; they knew each other, as often as possible; truly their loins were a wonderland. 18 And they were happy, having not yet eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge That Your Lifestyle Is Sinful.
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David Javerbaum (An Act of God: Previously Published as The Last Testament: A Memoir by God)
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Don’t worry: It’s not excessively expensive or a threat to the efficiency of the Internet to keep track of where information came from. It will actually make the Internet faster and more efficient.
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Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future?)
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If we understand how a person’s body influences risk taking, we can learn how to better manage risk takers. We can also recognize that mistakes governments have made have contributed to excessive risk taking. Consider the most important risk manager of them all — the Federal Reserve. Over the past 20 years, the Fed has pioneered a new technique of influencing Wall Street. Where before the Fed shrouded its activities in secrecy, it now informs the street in as clear terms as possible of what it intends to do with short-term interest rates, and when. Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Fed, declared this new transparency, called forward guidance, a revolution; Ben S. Bernanke, her predecessor, claimed it reduced uncertainty and calmed the markets. But does it really calm the markets? Or has eliminating uncertainty in policy spread complacency among the financial community and actually helped inflate market bubbles?
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Anonymous
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The only possible way to have full understanding of the teachings of Jesus is through the light of the Spirit of God shining inside us. If we have never had the experience of taking our casual, religious shoes off our casual, religious feet—getting rid of all the excessive informality with which we approach God—it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The people who are flippant and disrespectful in their approach to God are those who have never been introduced to Jesus Christ. Only after the amazing delight and liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does, comes the impenetrable “darkness” of realizing who He is.
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Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
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I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological … I also blur out the excess of unimportant information” (fig. 1.6).30 The usual critical response to these works is to see the blurring as a reference to accidental effects in amateur photography, to the artlessness and thus authenticity of such “mistakes.” Hawker eloquently explains why Richter’s translation from photo to paint is significant: At the same time that the blur is able to evoke the medium of photography so effectively and economically, in using it as a sign of photography’s idiom, Richter fastens upon something incidental to and quite apart from the medium’s central unifying characteristics (whatever these might be). It is the double duty that the blur does for Richter – its ability to be incidental to photography at the same time as central to painting – that makes it such a powerfully affecting device in his painting.31
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Lynda Jessup (Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Book 14))
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Get Out Of Legal Trouble By Finding A Great Medical Malpractice Lawyer In Baltimore
You will save on legal costs when you're taking the time to effectively ensure that your medical malpractice lawyer knows what you need. Your lawyer ought to be well versed on how to get the best outcome for your case. Take these factors into consideration the next time you are searching for the right attorney.
Dependable attorneys are famous for having comprehensive, detailed interviews with their clients. The questions, though they might seem excessive, can help the medical malpractice lawyer in learning more about you before going into the courtroom, which will ultimately allow him to offer you the very best representation that they could. Whether it is from a book, online, or through questioning, any attorney worth his salt is usually out to learn more info. You have to find a new attorney immediately if the one you have is uninterested in your case and only asks a few pointless questions.
Law firms and independent attorneys are like all other business - they can acquire clients through deception. Look for proof when an attorney claims his work is exceptional in order to validate it. Perform a comprehensive background check to understand their case history, their performance in college and the type of reputation that they've. Online reviews can also help you determine if the legal consultant delivered on his or her promises.
There's nothing more important in the attorney-client relationship than good communication. A good, dependable medical malpractice lawyer can make sure that you have a clear understanding of any details they provide. The percentage of winning grows higher when your legal consultant understands and has all the info they need to win your case. Excellent interactions between you and your lawyer are vital to winning your case.
When working with a legal consultant, be very specific about what type of attorney you want to hire. You'll need to find a legal consultant that specializes in the kind of law that governs your legal case. Find attorneys who have had success in similar cases. Call for a consultation in order to understand more about the attorney and what other skills or experience they possess in the field your legal case falls under.
A medical malpractice lawyer who lacks moral character won't be up front about their ability to represent you. That attorney must be willing to inform you in the event that one is not able to handle your legal case in some way. Be really careful never to fall for attorneys who make false reports about past accomplishments. There are a few attorneys who'll need to work your legal case just to receive that new experience.
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Schochor Federico and Staton, P.A.
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Gradually, as Nero's excesses grew more unbridled, Seneca fell increasingly out of favour. At length he was accused, justly or unjustly, of complicity in a widespread conspiracy to murder Nero and place a new emperor—some said, Seneca himself—upon the throne. In view of his former services, he was graciously permitted to commit suicide (A.D. 65). His end was edifying. At first, on being informed of the Emperor's decision, he set about making a will. When told that there was no time allowed for such a lengthy business, he turned to his sorrowing family and said: 'Never mind, I leave you what is of far more value than earthly riches, the example of a virtuous life'—or
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Anonymous
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Layering and Separation 53C O N F U S I ON and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity — rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication.Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding. Among the most powerful devices for reducing noise and enriching the content of displays is the technique of layering and separation, visually stratifying various aspects of the data.
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Anonymous
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De-escalation De-escalation tactics are an important self-defense strategy used to defuse a potentially dangerous situation. The first and only objective in de-escalation is to reduce the level of anger/agitation so that a calmer discussion becomes possible. Reasoning with an enraged person is not possible. De-escalation skills are an important tool when dealing with people who are highly agitated, frustrated, angry, fearful, or intoxicated. These may ordinarily be peaceful individuals who are responding to an unusual or extreme circumstance; or, they may in fact be individuals with disruptive or potentially violent personalities. By controlling yourself and using tactical communication, you can reduce the increasing threat in a situation. The goal of de-escalation is to reduce the likelihood of the situation transitioning from a verbal altercation to physical violence. De-escalation can be achieved by developing a rapid rapport and a sense of connection with an agitated person. De-escalation, although a verbal tactic, consists not only of verbal techniques, but also psychological (emotions) and nonverbal (body language) techniques. De-escalation is a tactic of altering your demeanor to fit the circumstances. To use de-escalation as a self-defense tactic, you need to adapt your demeanor to the situation at hand and overcome or control your personal emotions. Here are some additional tactics to put into your toolbox: 1. Body Language: Have a confident body posture, but don’t look too aggressive. Pay close attention to your emotions, and be cautious to avoid tensing up your shoulders, neck, hands, or face. If you’re unable to compose your emotions, they can (and likely will) be felt by the aggravated person and may cause your de-escalation efforts to fail, despite using an appropriate tone and words. Stand relatively still, avoiding sudden jerky or excessive movements. Make sure to keep your hand gestures to a minimum. Basically, think similarly to how you would deal with an angry dog. 2. Voice: You generally want to keep your voice calm, firm, and low while speaking slowly and evenly. The tone, inflection, and volume of your voice can increase or decrease the other person’s anxiety and agitation. However, if the person is yelling, you may need to initially speak in a louder tone in order to be heard, and then guide them to a softer and slower pace. • Listen actively. Gather information by asking questions to develop a rapport, if possible under the circumstances, and gather information in order to begin to guide the communication in a less volatile direction. • Acknowledge their feelings. Some agitated people are unable to problem solve until their feelings are dealt with. By acknowledging their feelings, it often lets them know that they’re being heard. • Communicate clearly by explaining your intentions and conveying your expectations. Repeat yourself as much as necessary until you’re heard.
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Darren Levine (Krav Maga for Women: Your Ultimate Program for Self Defense)
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A person who leads a meaningful life does not need the excessive burdening flow of information.
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A.J. Swoboda (Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World)
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It is only through history that a people becomes
fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for
the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
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It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for
the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
“
It is only through history that a people becomes fully conscious of itself. This is why history should be seen as the rational self-consciousness of the human race, and is to the human race what the reflective, coherent, rationally conditioned consciousness is to the individual, the absence of which imprisons animals in the narrow, intuitive present. This is why every gap in history is like a gap in the recollecting self-consciousness of a human being; and we stand before a memorial of prehistoric antiquity that has outlived information about itself, such as, e.g., the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Yucatan, just as insensibly and naïvely as an animal in the presence of a human action in which it is involved as a servant, or just as a person before his own old secret code to which he has forgotten the key, or indeed just as a sleepwalker who discovers in the morning what he has done during the night. In this sense, history is to be regarded as the reason or the enlightened self-consciousness of the human race, and occupies the place of an immediate collective self-consciousness of the entire race, so that it is only through history that the human race is really made into a whole, into one humanity. This is the true value of history; and accordingly the chief basis for the universal and excessive interest we take in it is that it is of personal concern to the human race.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
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Liars fidget. The tone of their voice or speech patterns changes. Liars offer too much information, babbling on with excessive detail to convince themselves or others of what they are saying
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Freida McFadden (Never Lie)
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1. Body Language: Have a confident body posture, but don’t look too aggressive. Pay close attention to your emotions, and be cautious to avoid tensing up your shoulders, neck, hands, or face. If you’re unable to compose your emotions, they can (and likely will) be felt by the aggravated person and may cause your de-escalation efforts to fail, despite using an appropriate tone and words. Stand relatively still, avoiding sudden jerky or excessive movements. Make sure to keep your hand gestures to a minimum. Basically, think similarly to how you would deal with an angry dog. 2. Voice: You generally want to keep your voice calm, firm, and low while speaking slowly and evenly. The tone, inflection, and volume of your voice can increase or decrease the other person’s anxiety and agitation. However, if the person is yelling, you may need to initially speak in a louder tone in order to be heard, and then guide them to a softer and slower pace. • Listen actively. Gather information by asking questions to develop a rapport, if possible under the circumstances, and gather information in order to begin to guide the communication in a less volatile direction. • Acknowledge their feelings. Some agitated people are unable to problem solve until their feelings are dealt with. By acknowledging their feelings, it often lets them know that they’re being heard. • Communicate clearly by explaining your intentions and conveying your expectations. Repeat yourself as much as necessary until you’re heard. Certain behaviors have been found to escalate agitated people: • Ignoring the person • Making threats • Hurtful remarks and/or name calling • Arguing • Commanding or shouting • Invading personal space • Threatening gestures with your arms or hands, such as finger wagging or pointing Keep in mind that our natural instincts when in an aggressive or potentially violent encounter are to fight, flight, or freeze. However, in using de-escalation, we can’t do any of these. We must appear centered and calm even when we’re terrified. Therefore, these techniques must be practiced before they’re needed, so that they can become second nature. But keep in mind: It’s always important that you trust your instincts. If you feel that de-escalation is not working, STOP! You’ll know within as little as a few minutes to sometimes only a few seconds if it’s beginning to work. If not, tell the person to leave, escort him/her to the door, call for help, walk away, and/or call the police.
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Darren Levine (Krav Maga for Women: Your Ultimate Program for Self Defense)
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Excessive Shame It is unfortunate that one of the recurring experiences for individuals with ADHD is personal criticism or comments about how they just did something stupid. Often, the people making these comments are important authority figures—parents, teachers, peers, bosses, and, yes, spouses. Unfinished projects (distraction), poor decision making (impulsivity or too much information to process), memory problems, and more mean that people with ADHD often fail to do things as quickly as or in the same way that those without ADHD do them.
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Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
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Right Mindfulness: Practice keeping to basic requisites of food, clothing, accommodation and medicine. Make things last. Refuse to live with excess. When you go to the shops carry shopping bags from home and do not accept plastic bags. Keep packaging to the minimum. Give to charity shops and buy from them. Be mindful of what you wear in terms of the ethics of shops and clothing factories. Avoid companies that are known to sell goods made in ‘sweat-shops’ in developing countries. Be mindful and informed about all points in this Charter. Right Renunciation: Let go of desire for a bigger or better home. Have a spring clean in your home and see what you can give away or recycle. Support and develop love of minimalism and enjoy the outdoors in all weathers. Avoid shopping malls. Buy only necessities. Avoid impulse shopping. Keep out of debt. Offer dana (in the form of donations, time, and energy) to worthwhile projects and individuals. Right Sustainability: Be well informed about recycling; compost waste food and recycle paper,
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Christopher Titmuss (The Political Buddha)
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Accurate information and better technology are important in promoting discovery, but so are excessively optimistic, unrealistic, even flat-out false anticipations. The marvelous is more important than the scientific in the initial and most risky stages of innovation. Business histories tend to emphasize technological or conceptual, “paradigm-shifting” breakthroughs, but it is the crazes, fads, and marvels that seize the imagination, including that of investors and those who undertake physical and financial risks. The gold rush, the Internet craze, tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble—some of these were exaggerations, others were swindles, but they have a prominent, if unappealingly irrational, place in the history of innovation.
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Paul Freedman (Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination)
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VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting is a stage above shared Hosting plans. Whenever you purchase a VPS Hosting plan, you are basically getting a small server inside the bigger server.
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SAM
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When mortals go through a prosperous period, it seems to be human nature for expenses to balloon. We are going to be the exception. I have just informed the purchasing department that they should no longer purchase paper clips. All of us receive documents every day with paper clips on them. If we save these paper clips, not only will we have enough for our own use, but we will also, in a short time, be awash in the little critters. Periodically, we will collect excess paper clips and sell them (since the cost to us is zero, the Arbitrage Department tells me the return on capital will be above average). This action may seem a little petty, but anything we can do to make our people conscious of expenses is worthwhile.
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Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)