“
Overexpansion is counterproductive when you don’t have enough resources to sustain that.
”
”
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (Expanse, #1))
“
There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.
”
”
E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)
“
I know it's none of my business, but I really wouldn't let her put you off. So you don't understand sex and love and women. Just means you were born with a cock. And this girl? Naomi? She seems like she's worth putting a little effort into it. You know?"
"Yeah," Holden said. Then: "Can we never talk about that again?"
"Sure.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1))
“
What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9))
“
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men. In order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
”
”
John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
“
If we exaggerate the present and future value of the stock market, then as a society we may invest too much in business start-ups and expansions, and too little in infrastructure, education, and other forms of human capital.
”
”
Robert J. Shiller (Irrational Exuberance)
“
The greatest tragedy in life is not death but life without a purpose—life with the wrong priorities. Life’s greatest challenge is in knowing what to do. The greatest mistake in life is to be busy but not effective. Life’s greatest failure is to be successful in the wrong assignment. Success in life is measured by the effective use of one’s time.
”
”
Myles Munroe (Kingdom Principles: Preparing for Kingdom Experience and Expansion (Kingdom series Book 2))
“
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.
And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
“
Walking uplifts the spirit. Breathe out the poisons of tension, stress, and worry; breathe in the power of God. Send forth little silent prayers of goodwill toward those you meet. Walk with a sense of being a part of a vast universe. Consider the thousands of miles of earth beneath your feet; think of the limitless expanse of space above your head. Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.
”
”
Wilferd Peterson
“
I understand that there are different expressions of Christianity in different cultures. Contextualization is essential for the growth and expansion of the church. But there is a difference between contextualization and compromise. Using goat's milk for communion in a culture that has never heard of wine or grapes is contextualization; sacrificing the goat is compromise. Having a Saturday night service because we have run out of room in all four Sunday services is contextualization; having a Saturday night service to accommodate and/or appease people who are “too busy” on Sunday is compromise.
”
”
Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (The Ever-Loving Truth: Can Faith Thrive in a Post-Christian Culture?)
“
Corporate loans can be used for various purposes like expansion, working capital, or equipment purchases. Sometimes these loans fuel the next level of growth, and sometimes it help keep afloat a company that might otherwise die.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Fill. The third phase of dominion is to “fill” or “replenish” the earth. Bearing fruit, refining our gift, and mastering the use of our resources create demand and lead naturally to wider “distribution.” To “fill the earth” means to expand our gift, our influence, our resources, just as a growing business would by continually improving its product, opening new outlets, and hiring more employees. Another way to look at it is to think once again of an apple tree. A single apple seed grows into an apple tree, which then produces apples, each of which contains seeds for producing more trees. Planting those seeds soon turns a single apple tree into a whole orchard. This expansion to “fill the earth” is a joint effort between the Lord and us. Our part is to be faithful with the resources He has given. He is the one who brings the expansion. The more faithful we are with our stewardship, the more resources God will entrust to us. That is a biblical principle.
”
”
Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
“
I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics: (1) It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. (2) It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium. (3) Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a Iive-and-let-Iive tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism. (4) It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion. (5) It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication. (6) It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process. (7) The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory
waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.
”
”
Timothy Leary (Neuropolitique)
“
Shortcomings in the governments’ handling of monetary matters and the disastrous consequences of policies aimed at lowering the rate of interest and at encouraging business activities through credit expansion gave birth to the ideas which finally generated the slogan “stabilization.” One can explain its emergence and its popular appeal, one can understand it as the fruit of the last hundred and fifty years’ history of currency and banking, one can, as it were, plead extenuating circumstances for the error involved. But no such sympathetic appreciation can render its fallacies any more tenable.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (Human Action)
“
Try, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from a single physical phenomenon. Keep in mind the effects of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-sources, films, expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature, elasticity, on color. Think of an object's capacity to emit, reflect, absorb, transmit, or scatted light; think of "the operation of light on a feather." Ask yourself, what is the color of a puddle? Is your blue sofa still blue when you stumble past it on your way to the kitchen for water in the middle of the night; is it still blue if you don't get up, and no one enters the room to see it? Fifteen says after we are born, we begin to discriminate against colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess "color." You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.
”
”
Maggie Nelson (Bluets)
“
That feels unfair,” Jim said. “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9))
“
Each item of business was described in the expansive, flourishing script that Balfour associated in his mind, with a man who could afford to waste his ink on curlicues.
”
”
Eleanor Catton
“
Venture capital is for expansion, not exploration.
”
”
Jim McKelvey (The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time)
“
Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. “The weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nation’s growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they determine what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution, they by the same token determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation; our conscience in matters of law and our opportunity in matters of politics are in their hands.”10 Moreover, the only legitimate opinions the federal courts can render are those that endorse and promote the expansion of federal power. “[T]hat if they had interpreted the Constitution in its strict letter, as some proposed, and not in its spirit, like the charter of a business corporation and not like the charter of a living government, the vehicle of a nation
”
”
Mark R. Levin (Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America)
“
This business, ultimately, embodied the challenges of globalization, of the push and pull between expansion and identity, about the universalization of a product that is steeped in decidedly nonuniversal customs.
”
”
Joshua Robinson (The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports)
“
business cycles and depressions stem from disturbances generated in the market by monetary intervention. The monetary theory holds that money and credit-expansion, launched by the banking system, causes booms and busts.
”
”
Murray N. Rothbard (America's Great Depression)
“
The Industrial Revolution started and made its biggest strides in England because of her uniquely inclusive economic institutions. These in turn were built on foundations laid by the inclusive political institutions brought about by the Glorious Revolution. It was the Glorious Revolution that strengthened and rationalized property rights, improved financial markets, undermined state-sanctioned monopolies in foreign trade, and removed the barriers to the expansion of industry. It was the Glorious Revolution that made the political system open and responsive to the economic needs and aspirations of society. These inclusive economic institutions gave men of talent and vision such as James Watt the opportunity and incentive to develop their skills and ideas and influence the system in ways that benefited them and the nation. Naturally these men, once they had become successful, had the same urges as any other person. They wanted to block others from entering their businesses and competing against them and feared the process of creative destruction that might put them out of business, as they had previously bankrupted others.
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
“
Understand this, you’re not missing out on anything when you live a life that’s totally devoted to the limitless expansion of your sensuality. Because you’re busy falling in love with the process of becoming the best version of yourself.
”
”
Lebo Grand
“
Commercial loans serve various purposes, from financing expansion and working capital to equipment acquisition and real estate investment – They’re a very important part of the capital ecosystem of the world, and of its individual nations.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
No. There’s some evidence that their next-generation sensor arrays can recognize rail-gun capacitors.” “That feels unfair,” Jim said. “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9))
“
Moms, we have a profoundly important choice. We can view motherhood as parasitic or mutualistic. We can view motherhood as an expansion of what we can become or as a restriction of who we already are. Motherhood can be a pathway of meaning-making or life-taking.
”
”
Morgan Cutlip (Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself: 5 Steps for Busy Moms to Banish Guilt and Finally Beat Burnout)
“
One keeps looking out for innovation in IPL, but of late it hasn't been all that obvious. Lionel Richie as an opening act? Johnny Mathis must have been busy. Matthew Hayden's Mongoose? Looks a bit like Bob Willis' bat with the "flow-through holes"; Saint Peter batting mitts are surely overdue a revival. The only genuinely intriguing step this year, bringing the IPL to YouTube, was forced on Modi by the collapse of Setanta; otherwise what Modi presents as 'innovation' is merely expansion by another name, in the number of franchises and the number of games.
”
”
Gideon Haigh
“
The Entrepreneurial Perspective adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business.
”
”
Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
“
The 1950s witnessed especially rapid expansion of electronic and electrical firms, of tobacco, soft drink, and food-processing companies, and of the chemical, plastics, and pharmaceutical industries. IBM blossomed as a leader in the computer business, soon to become a guiding star of the American economy.
”
”
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
“
He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him. that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.
Henry saw it, too. "Like something from Tolstoy, isn't it?" he remarked.
Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face.
"Yes," he said. "Isn't it, though?
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
“
Part and parcel of Beijing’s (master) plan isn’t simply corporate expansion, but maximum employment. Give citizens jobs, so Beijing’s thinking goes, and the people won’t protest things like crackdowns on press freedoms or massive corruption or reeducation camps. Bottomless loans ensure enough economic churn to keep the masses’ hands busy, the economy moving, and the Party in power.
”
”
Peter Zeihan (Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World)
“
That's the best way to know anything, although no one ever tells you that. No one ever says, "Just use the expansive feeling in your chest to understand what's true, and what you want, and where to go, and what really matters," because they're too busy forcing you to learn from books that they're choosing, and pointing at whiteboards that they're writing on, and encouraging you to ask questions from curriculums that they've set.
”
”
Madeleine Ryan (A Room Called Earth)
“
That's the best way to know anything, although no one ever tells you that. No one ever says, "Just use the expansive feeling in your chest to understand what's true, and what you want, and where to go, and what really matters," because they're too busy forcing you to learn from books that they're choosing, and pointing at whiteboards that they're writing on, and encouraging you to ask questions from curriculums that they've set.
”
”
Madeleine Ryan (A Room Called Earth)
“
It’s ironic perhaps – but no one wants to lend money to someone or something that has no money or no monetary worth. You wouldn’t plant a seed on barren ground – you plant a seed where there’s already a wealth of resources sufficient to cultivate the seed. It could be a tiny bit of soil in a pot, or the expanse of your front yard. But you’re going to make sure the seed has enough soil to put down roots and a quality of soil that facilitates growth.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.
”
”
Mike Huckabee (God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: and the Dad-Gummed Gummint That Wants to Take Them Away)
“
If you’ve ever flown into London, you’ll know that they often have to put you in a holding pattern, where you circle about, waiting for a landing slot. And I never usually mind it; I like seeing the vast expanse of the huge city below me, that unfathomable number of people busying away, the idea that every single one of them is full of hopes and dreams and disappointments, street after street after street, millions and millions of souls and dreams. I always find it pleasingly mind-boggling.
”
”
Jenny Colgan (The Cafe by the Sea (Mure #1))
“
There is a common myth that people resist change. The reality is that most people are willing to embrace change when they are in charge of the change or when they believe the change offers expansion and growth. People get married, have children, buy new homes, move across the country, and start businesses. They pay off debt, lose weight, give up addictions, and run marathons, even though the changes are difficult mentally, physically, or spiritually. The kind of change people resist is change that is imposed upon them against their wishes, change that is unwanted, unexpected, or forced.
”
”
Marlene Chism (No Drama Leadership: How Enlightened Leaders Transform Culture in the Workplace)
“
It might seem that we have to generate the sense of openness, freshness, joy, revelry, or stillness we touch in such moments. From the Buddhist perspective, however, such a state of being is already there within us and has been so since the beginning.
It's tantalizing to think that perhaps expansiveness lies waiting to be uncovered within us while we go searching for it everywhere else. It’s not something we go toward so much as it is what we are left with when all our running around ceases. Our deeper nature is simply what’s left when we put down the endless task of trying to be somebody
”
”
Ralph De La Rosa (The Monkey Is the Messenger: Meditation and What Your Busy Mind Is Trying to Tell You)
“
I have no criticism of the basic concept of irrefutable authority. Properly employed, it is the easiest, the surest, and the proper way to resolve conflicts. There is an omnipresent temptation, however, to rely on such authority regardless of its applicability; and I know of no better examples than the scriptures and the Constitution.
We find it easy to lapse into the expansive notion that the Constitution, like the gospel, embraces all truth and that it protects and guarantees all that is right, equitable, and just. From that grand premise it is only a short and comfortable leap to the proposition that the Constitution embraces my particular notion of what is right, equitable, and just. The Constitution lends itself to this kind of use because of its breadth.
Issues such as foreign aid, fluoridation of water, public versus private education, progressive income tax, to which political party I should belong and which candidate I should support; questions about economic development and environmental quality control; questions about the power of labor unions and the influence of big business in government--all these are issues of great importance. But these questions cannot and ought not to be resolved by simply resorting to irrefutable authority. Neither the Constitution nor the scriptures contain answers to these questions, and under the grand plan of eternal progress it is our responsibility to develop our own skills by working out our own answers through our own thought processes.
For example, the Constitution authorizes an income tax, but it neither commands nor forbids an income tax. That is a policy issue on which the Constitution--and the scriptures--are silent. Attempting to resolve our differences of opinion by asserting that if our opponents only understood the scriptures or the Constitution they would see that the whole answer is contained therein only results in foreclosing the careful, rational attention that these issues deserve and require. Resorting to several broad provisions of the Constitution in answer to that kind of question is just plain intellectual laziness.
We, of all people, have an obligation to respect the Constitution--to respect it not only for what it is and what it does, but also for what it is not and what it does not do. For in this as in other contexts, improper use of that which is grand can only result in the diminution of its grandeur.
”
”
Rex E. Lee
“
It is ironic that Keynesianism originated as a weapon to combat depression, but became universally accepted and "successful" only during (and because of!) the postwar expansion. At the first sign of renewed world recession, Keynesian theory has proved itself to be a snare and a delusion that has gone into immediate bankruptcy. The resulting "post-Keynesian synthesis" is also the theoretical reason for the reactionary exhumation of the simplistic, neoclassical, and monetarist economic theory of the 1920s. This revival of old theory is highlighted by the award of Nobel prizes in economics to Friedrich von Hayek, whose theoretical work was done before the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman, whose lone voice echoed in the wilderness until the new world economic crisis put his unpopular and antipopulist theories on the agenda of business board rooms and government cabinet rooms in one capitalist country after another. The real reason for the recent interest in fifty-year-old theories is that capital now wants them to legitimize its attack on the welfare state and "unproductive" expenditures on social services, which capital claims to need for "productive" investment in industry, including armaments.
”
”
André Gunder Frank (Reflections on World Economic Crisis)
“
Overall, more than fifty-nine thousand factories and production facilities were shut down all across America over the last decade, and employment in the core manufacturing sector fell from 17.1 million to 11.8 million from January 2001 to December 2011, a punishing toll for what historically had been the best sector for steady, good-paying middle-class jobs. By pursuing a deliberate strategy of continual layoffs and by holding down wages, both of which yielded higher profits for investors, business leaders were not only squeezing their employees, they were slowly strangling the middle-class consumer demand that the nation needed for the next economic expansion.
”
”
Hedrick Smith (Who Stole the American Dream?)
“
This return to militant, literal, old-fashioned religion had three aspects. For the masses it was, in the main, a method of coping with the increasingly bleak and inhuman oppressive society of middle-class liberalism: in Marx's phrase (but he was not the only one to use such words) it was the "heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions...the opium of the people". More than this: it attempted to create social and sometimes educational and political institutions in an environment which provided none, and among politically undeveloped people it gave primitive expression to their discontents and aspirations. It's literalism, emotionalism, and superstition protested both against the entire society in which rational calculation dominated and against the upper classes who deformed religion in their own image.
For the middle classes rising out of such masses, religion could be a powerful moral prop, a justification of their social existence against the united contempt and hatred of traditional society, and an engine of their expansion. It liberated them from the fetters of that society, if they were sectarians. It gave their profits a moral title great than that of mere rational self-interest; it legitimized their harshness toward the oppressed; it united with trade to bring civilization to the heathen and sales to the business.
”
”
Eric J. Hobsbawm (The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848)
“
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes - will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
”
”
John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
“
It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was.
”
”
Diane C. Fujino (Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Critical American Studies))
“
When I speak of the contemplative life [...] I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together. A certain depth of disciplined experience is a necessary ground for fruitful action. Without a more profound human understanding derived from exploration of the inner ground of human existence, love will tend to be superficial and deceptive. Traditionally, the ideas of prayer, meditation, and contemplation have been associated with this deepening of one's personal life and this expansion of the capacity to understand and serve others.
”
”
Thomas Merton (Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, The Essential Writings)
“
Dreams are tunnels. They usher us between landscapes, memories, time. They wormhole us between worlds. Dreams connect us to the many selves we are in other places. The choices we almost made, could have made, but for whatever reason, did not make. Parallels split and some other iteration of the selves we nearly were go strutting about their business, unaware that we were once joined together, once twinned, mirrored at the center. Unaware that one flick of the tongue, flick of the wrist, one detail different, one movement unmade, and it could have been us through the blackness of space, through the membrane-thin wall separating us, and landing on the other side, atoms floating, atoms loving, atoms breaking apart and reshaping in the endless dance of the expansion into whatever comes after nothingness. Dreams are glimpses through all this invisible matter.
”
”
Jennifer Givhan (Jubilee)
“
A classic LBO works this way: An investor decides to buy a company by putting up equity, similar to the down payment on a house, and borrowing the rest, the leverage. Once acquired, the company, if public, is delisted, and its shares are taken private, the “private” in the term “private equity.” The company pays the interest on its debt from its own cash flow while the investor improves various areas of a business’s operations in an attempt to grow the company. The investor collects a management fee and eventually a share of the profits earned whenever the investment in monetized. The operational improvements that are implemented can range from greater efficiencies in manufacturing, energy utilization, and procurement; to new product lines and expansion into new markets; to upgraded technology; and even leadership development of the company’s management team.
”
”
Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
“
The idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightened means of determining nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight, what policies we should pass, whom we should put behind bars for the rest of their lives, and who gets to control our government. This is a deadly serous business. While protecting children from abuse is a noble goal, an overly expansive definition of bullying cannot be allowed to hobble the gravely important exchange of ideas among adults upon which our nation depends. The new emphasis on collegiate "bullying" treats adults like kindergarteners and forgets entirely the gravity of the issues we face in our democracy every single day and the rightful passions they ignite.
”
”
Greg Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate)
“
The idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightenend means of determining nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight, what policies we should pass, whom we should put behind bars for the rest of their lives, and who gets to control our government. This is a deadly serous business. While protecting children from abuse is a noble goal, an overly expansive definition of bullying cannot be allowed to hobble the gravely important exchange of ideas among adults upon which our nation depends. The new emphasis on collegiate "bullying" treats adults like kindergarteners and forgets entirely the gravity of the issues we face in our democracy every single day and the rightful passions they ignite.
”
”
Greg Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate)
“
Sara and I are both leaving within the hour. In my carriage."
"Together?" Lily looked startled, and then shook her head. "You can't. Don't you realize what people would say when they discovered that both of you were gone?"
"Nothing they haven't said already." He slid a proprietary arm around Sara's shoulders.
Lily drew her slight frame up as tall as possible, adopting the brisk tone of a chaperone defending her charge. "Where are you planning to go?"
Derek smiled slowly. "None of your damn business, gypsy." Ignoring Lily's sputtering protests, he stared down at his fiancée and raised his brows mockingly.
As she met his glinting green eyes, Sara realized he intended to take her to London and keep her with him for the night. Her nerves jangled with alarm. "I'm not certain it's advisable-" she began diplomatically, but he cut her off.
"Go pack your things."
Oh, the arrogance. But it was part of why she loved him, his single-minded determination to get what he wanted. Only blind, bullying stubbornness had enabled him to climb from the gutter. Now that the prospect of marrying her was within his reach, he planned to ensure it by well and truly compromising her. After tonight there would be no turning back. Sara stared at the broad expanse of his chest, conscious of the weight of his arm across her shoulders, the gentle stroke of his thumb and forefinger against her neck. Well... reprehensible as it was, she wanted the same thing.
"Derek," Lily said in a steely voice, "I won't allow you to force this poor child into something she's not prepared for-"
"She's not a child." His fingers tightened on the back of Sara's neck. "Tell her what you want, Sara."
Helplessly Sara raised her head and looked at Lily, her face turning a deep shade of crimson. "I... I'm leaving with Mr. Craven." She didn't have to look at Derek to know that he was smiling in satisfaction.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Dreaming of You (The Gamblers of Craven's, #2))
“
In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.
Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.
Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
...
The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?
”
”
Tamim Ansary (Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes)
“
I don’t know the answer, but I know that the fiscal cliff is real. It can’t be discounted like Y2K fears. In 2008, for the first time in my career, my clients were really scared. We are three years from the bottom of the market, and they’re still scared.
“New home construction in our area is picking up, and my client in the business wants to hire more people to handle the demand. But what if the economy falters? He would have to let them go. At 70, he doesn’t have the heart to face that, so he makes do with less.
“A New York client in the vending business wants to hire young adults to help him expand his business. If he pays them fifty thousand dollars, it will cost him close to ninety thousand after taxes and mandatory health benefits. It’s just not worth it.
“My clients are suffocating under the blanket of excessive regulations, taxes, and the biggest impediment to growth and expansion, uncertainty.” Mac’s voice softened. “My biggest fear is that I don’t have the answer and I don’t know how to help them.
”
”
Marvin H. McIntyre (Inside Out)
“
Yet of the countless articles, books and so-called lifehacks about productivity I’ve read (or written!), the only “trick” that has ever truly and consistently worked is both the simplest and the most difficult to master: just getting started.
Enter micro-progress.
Pardon the gimmicky phrase, but the idea goes like this: For any task you have to complete, break it down into the smallest possible units of progress and attack them one at a time.
...
My favorite expansion of this concept is in this post by James Clear.
In it, he uses Newton’s laws of motion as analogies for productivity. To wit, rule No. 1: “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Find a way to get started in less than two minutes.”
...
And it’s not just gimmicky phrases and so-called lifehacking: Studies have shown that you can trick your brain into increasing dopamine levels by setting and achieving, you guessed it, micro-goals.
Going even further, success begets success. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article, researchers reported finding that “ordinary, incremental progress can increase people’s engagement in the work and their happiness during the workday.
”
”
Tim Herrera
“
centuries-long debate over the nature of money can be reduced to two sides. One school sees money as merely a commodity, a preexisting thing, with its own inherent value. This group believes that societies chose certain commodities to become mutually recognized units of exchange in order to overcome the cumbersome business of barter. Exchanging sheep for bread was imprecise, so in our agrarian past traders agreed that a certain commodity, be it shells or rocks or gold, could be a stand-in for everything else. This “metallism” viewpoint, as it is known, encourages the notion that a currency should itself be, or at least be backed by, some tangible material. This orthodox view of currency is embraced by many gold bugs and hard-money advocates from the so-called Austrian school of economics, a group that has enjoyed a renaissance in the wake of the financial crisis with its critiques of expansionist central-bank policies and inflationary fiat currencies. They blame the asset bubble that led to the crisis on reckless monetary expansion by unfettered central banks. The other side of the argument belongs to the “chartalist” school, a group that looks past the thing of currency and focuses instead on the credit and trust relationships between the individual and society at large that currency embodies. This view, the one we subscribe to and which informs
”
”
Paul Vigna (The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order)
“
Having grown up knowing the formerly-mentioned historical figures on the bus are part of my family lineage, I was interested to learn that at least one, famed American psychic and suffragette, Amanda Theodosia Jones (of Puritan, Quaker and Huguenot heritage), was a self-proclaimed spiritualist. While aware of her inventions and business endeavors, I’d never been informed of her interest in metaphysics.
Possessing a rather significant collection of her letters, poetry and other documents, it is perhaps my intimate relationship with this extraordinary individual inspiring my lifelong engagement with the psychic world. Indeed, in a recent dream, the spirit of Amanda T. Jones contacted me for reasons that will later be delineated. It is my ongoing contact with her and other spirit entities (including the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kuan Yin), in fact, inspiring me to pen this manuscript.
Having dedicated her 1910 autobiography, A Psychic Autobiography to William James, (known today as the Father of Modern Psychology and who’d encouraged her to author it), Ms. Jones therein described her psychic abilities and subsequent expansion into spiritualism. Her developing interest in mysticism led her to be among those at the forefront of the spiritualist movement that, for a period of time before and after the Civil War, captured the imagination of millions. In her poetry book (Poems, 1854–1906), she detailed a family incident leading to what could be considered as a miracle.
”
”
Hope Bradford (The Healing Power of Dreams: The Science of Dream Analysis and Journaling for Your Best Life! (A Wealth of Dreams Interpreted))
“
Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
“
One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents.
The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.
”
”
Jason Rebello (Red Earth Diaries: A Migrant Couple's Backpacking Adventure in Australia)
“
In the end, Putin won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values. The news media assisted greatly by elevating stolen innocuous emails from an insecure party server to a national crisis in which the victims were treated suspiciously. To Trump supporters it validated everything they ever suspected about Hillary Clinton—she hid emails, which meant she was a liar. No matter that Trump voters elected a man who openly embraced white supremacy, rejected diversity, abhorred global engagement, ignored his own corruption, and enlisted his own family and staff as royalty to be worshipped. Trump voters saw these traits as perks. They viewed nepotism, largess, and excess as virtues of a business and political shark. If he vocally stood against virtually all gains America had made in equality and global economic expansion since 1964 and it got him elected, then all the better that he hold those positions. By all means necessary was Trump’s apparent motto for the 2016 election. Russian intelligence lived by that motto too. The spies of the Red Square were shameless enough but the real scandal was that Team Trump saw nothing wrong with it. Trump voters had blindly elected him despite knowing that Russia had intervened in the electoral process. They cared not that Trump’s own surprising level of slavish devotion to Putin was suspicious. It. Did. Not. Matter. Trump had created a cult of personality in the white lower class so that they worshipped his every word and challenged the veracity of anything negative said against him. This worked out well for Putin. For the
”
”
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
“
We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states.
In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton.
Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.
”
”
Grace Blakeley
“
BARGAIN-ISSUE PATTERN IN SECONDARY COMPANIES. We have defined a secondary company as one that is not a leader in a fairly important industry. Thus it is usually one of the smaller concerns in its field, but it may equally well be the chief unit in an unimportant line. By way of exception, any company that has established itself as a growth stock is not ordinarily considered “secondary.” In the great bull market of the 1920s relatively little distinction was drawn between industry leaders and other listed issues, provided the latter were of respectable size. The public felt that a middle-sized company was strong enough to weather storms and that it had a better chance for really spectacular expansion than one that was already of major dimensions. The depression years 1931–32, however, had a particularly devastating impact on the companies below the first rank either in size or in inherent stability. As a result of that experience investors have since developed a pronounced preference for industry leaders and a corresponding lack of interest most of the time in the ordinary company of secondary importance. This has meant that the latter group have usually sold at much lower prices in relation to earnings and assets than have the former. It has meant further that in many instances the price has fallen so low as to establish the issue in the bargain class. When investors rejected the stocks of secondary companies, even though these sold at relatively low prices, they were expressing a belief or fear that such companies faced a dismal future. In fact, at least subconsciously, they calculated that any price was too high for them because they were heading for extinction—just as in 1929 the companion theory for the “blue chips” was that no price was too high for them because their future possibilities were limitless. Both of these views were exaggerations and were productive of serious investment errors. Actually, the typical middle-sized listed company is a large one when compared with the average privately owned business. There is no sound reason why such companies should not continue indefinitely in operation, undergoing the vicissitudes characteristic of our economy but earning on the whole a fair return on their invested capital.
”
”
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
If it were any of the other Sharpes, he wouldn’t balk. But the idea of spending serveral hours in her company was both intoxicating and terrifying.
“If you don’t let me go along,” she continued, “I’ll just follow you.
He scowled at her. She probably would; the woman was as stubborn as she was beautiful.
“And don’t think you can outride me, either,” she added. “Halstead Hall has a very good stable, and lady Bell is one of our swiftest mounts.”
“Lady Bell?” he said sarcastically. “Not Crack Shot or Pistol?”
She glared over at him. “Lady Bell was my favorite doll when I was a girl, the last one Mama gave me before she died. I used to play with it whenever I wanted to remember her. The doll got so ragged that I threw her away when I outgrew her.” Her voice lowered. “I regretted that later, but by then it was too late.”
The idea of her playing with a doll to remember her late mother made his throat tighten and his heart falter. “Fine,” he bit out. “You can go with me to High Wycombe.”
Surprise turned her cheeks rosy. “Oh, thank you, Jackson! You won’t regret it, I promise you!”
“I already regret it,” he grumbled. “And you must do as I say. None of your going off half-cocked, do you hear?”
“I never go off half-cocked!”
“No, you just walk around with a pistol packed full of powder, thinking you can hold men at bay with it.”
She tossed her head. “You’ll never let me forget that, will you?”
“Not as long as we both shall live.”
The minute the words left his lips, he could have kicked himself. They sounded too much like a vow, one he’d give anything for the right to make.
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to have noticed. Instead, she was squirming and shimmying about on her saddle.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’ve got a burr caught in my stocking that keeps rubbing against my leg. I’m just trying to work it out. Don’t mind me.”
His mouth went dry at her mention of stockings. It brought yesterday’s encounter vividly into his mind, how he’d lifted her skirts to reach the smooth expanse of calf encased in silk. How he’d run his hands up her thighs as his mouth had tasted-
God save him. He couldn’t be thinking about such things while riding. He shifted uncomfortably in the saddle as they reached the road and settled into a comfortable pace.
The road was busy at this early hour. The local farmers were driving their carts to market or town, and laborers were headed for the fields. To Jackson’s relief, that made it easy not to talk. Conversaing with her was bound to be difficult, especially if she started consulting him about her suitors.
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (A Lady Never Surrenders (Hellions of Halstead Hall, #5))
“
Best Place to Buy LinkedIn Accounts
Egsmm.com Best place to Buy LinkedIn Accounts. We provide all kind of LinkedIn Accounts, We have old new both type account with any quantity Connections. We have also NFC Passport Verified LinkedIn Account for sale. You can Buy LinkedIn Accounts from here with securely.
• All LinkedIn Accounts are stronger than others
• All Accounts are Old/Aged
• Aged LinkedIn Accounts with Connections
• Old 500+ Connections LinkedIn accounts available
• Professional & Verified Accounts
• Delivery Time within 24 hours
• Good Profile Picture Added
• Very Strong & Professional Accounts
• Real & High-Quality Accounts
Contact Us for more Information’s:
Skype: EGSMM
Telegram: @Egsmmofficial
WhatsApp: +1 (747) 315-9408
Email: egsmm24@gmail.com
Buy Old LinkedIn Accounts
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for professional networking and business growth. Building an authentic presence on LinkedIn enhances credibility and opens up numerous opportunities for career advancement.
Focus on creating a genuine profile, engaging with connections, and sharing valuable content. This approach not only ensures compliance with LinkedIn’s guidelines but also fosters meaningful relationships and professional growth. Investing time in developing a real LinkedIn presence pays off in the long run, providing a solid foundation for networking and career success.
Introduction To Egsmm.com And Their Services
Egsmm.com offers an efficient platform to buy LinkedIn accounts, perfect for professionals seeking immediate network expansion. Enhance your business connections and online presence with their reliable services.
Enhancing your LinkedIn presence has never been easier. Egsmm.com offers seamless solutions for buy LinkedIn accounts. Whether you’re building a network for personal branding or business growth, this service can be a game changer.
Contact Us for more Information’s:
Skype: EGSMM
Telegram: @Egsmmofficial
WhatsApp: +1 (747) 315-9408
Email: egsmm24@gmail.com
What Egsmm.com Offers
Egsmm.com provides a wide array of LinkedIn accounts tailored to your needs. Here’s a brief overview of their offerings:
• Verified Accounts: Authenticity guaranteed with verified details.
• Customizable Profiles: Tailor profiles to fit your brand or business.
• Rapid Delivery: Get your account quickly to start networking immediately.
Why Choose Egsmm.com?
Deciding on the right service is crucial. Here are the standout reasons to pick Egsmm.com:
• Reliability: Trusted by numerous clients for quality service.
• Affordability: Competitive pricing without compromising on quality.
• Customer Support: 24/7 support to resolve any issues promptly.
Types Of LinkedIn Accounts Available
Egsmm.com caters to various requirements with a range of LinkedIn accounts. They offer:
• Basic Accounts: Ideal for newcomers or small businesses.
”
”
Buy LinkedIn Accounts - 100% Real Connection (New-Old)
“
most of us suffer from hanging on too long to things that don’t work, to ways that are old-fashioned, clichéd, and not particular to us. Our fear of the future and the unknown has us holding on, white-knuckled, to our tiny ideas, closed to the expanse of possibilities that life has to offer.
”
”
James Victore (Feck Perfuction: Dangerous Ideas on the Business of Life)
“
But the flock of Silicon Valley unicorns had grown so large that Benioff himself had become nervous. The kind of rapid expansion that venture capital made possible wasn’t sustainable without discipline. In the middle of the decade, Benioff had issued a warning: “There’s going to be a lot of dead unicorns.” Neumann had begun pitching WeWork as a new breed of SaaS business: “space as a service.” The idea was that companies of all sizes would no longer handle their own real estate portfolios but would instead turn over the management of their physical space to WeWork, transforming the company into something like a real estate cloud—a “platform.” This was a goal shared by every ambitious start-up of the decade, no matter how specious the claim. Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb identified as platforms, as did Beyond Meat, the pea-protein burger maker (“plant-based-product platforms”); Peloton, the indoor exercise bike company (“the largest interactive fitness platform in the world”); and Casper, the mattress company (a “platform built for better sleep”). It was no longer good enough for companies to simply be what they were.
”
”
Reeves Wiedeman (Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork)
“
Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra.
To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge.
Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses.
The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website.
Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements. These cartoons were called Google Doodles.
They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites.
They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation.
Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google.
And no one cared.
People were delighted!
They were being honored!
By a corporation!
”
”
Jarett Kobek (Only Americans Burn in Hell)
“
an organization that creates and/or distributes goods and/or services and relies on financial profit for survival, success, and expansion capability.
”
”
Mark L. Russell (The Missional Entrepreneur: Principles and Practices for Business as Mission)
“
Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall
Quoting page 85-87:
Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
”
”
J. S. Furnivall
“
Do you want better and bigger goals? A better Future Self? Expose yourself to better perspectives and evolved people.
Business strategist Charlie Jones stated, “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”
By proactively changing your inputs of information, experiences, and people, you become aware of what you previously didn’t know. You see what you previously didn’t notice. You seek what you previously didn’t want. You act in ways you previously didn’t behave.
”
”
Benjamin P. Hardy (Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation)
“
Explore our innovative mezzanine floors, designed to optimize space and enhance functionality. Elevate your workspace with our customizable mezzanine solutions, perfect for businesses seeking efficient expansion and improved organization. Discover the possibilities today!
”
”
Mezzanine Floor Berkshire
“
Finance capital subordinates the Canadian State more and more directly to its interests and control. State-monopoly capitalism — the integration or merging of the interests of finance capital with the state — is a new stage in the extension of corporate control to all sectors of economic and political life. The government, while seemingly independent of specific corporate interests, has become predominantly the political instrument of a small group comprising the top monopoly capitalists for exercising control over the rest of society. Finance capital uses the state to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments. Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector — both services and enterprises — when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize. The state is also used to redistribute income and wealth in favour of monopoly interests through the tax system, and through legislation to drive down wages and weaken the trade union movement. State-monopoly capitalism undermines the basis of traditional bourgeois democracy. The subordination of the state to the interests of finance capital erodes the already limited role of elected government bodies, federal, provincial and local. Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.
”
”
The Communist Party Of Canada (Canada's Future Is Socialism Program of the Communist Party of Canada)
“
Here, Veblen’s iconoclasm showed its range, as he simultaneously exposed modern corporations as hives of swarming parasites, derided marginalism for disingenuously sanitizing these infested sites by rebranding nonproductivity as productivity, and attacked economists for failing to situate themselves historically. On Veblen’s account, the business enterprise was no more immune from historical change than any other economic institution. As the controlling force in modern civilization, the business enterprise too would necessarily undergo “natural decay” and prove “transitory.” Where history was heading next, however, Veblen felt he could not say, because no teleology was steering the evolutionary process as a whole, only (as he had said before) the “discretionary action of the human agents,” whose institutionally shaped choices were still unformed. Nevertheless, limiting himself to the “calculable future”—to what, in light of existing scientific knowledge, seemed probable in the near term—Veblen pointed to two contrasting possibilities, both beyond the ken of productivity theories.
One alternative was militarization and war—barbarism redux. According to Veblen, the business enterprise, as its grows, spills over national boundaries and fosters the expansion of a world market in which “the business men of one nation are pitted against those of another and swing“the forces of the state, legislative, diplomatic, and military, against one another in the strategic game of pecuniary advantage.” As this game intensifies, competing nations rush (said Veblen presciently) to amass military hardware that can easily fall under the control of political leaders who embrace aggressive international policies and “warlike aims, achievements, [and] spectacles.” Unchecked, these developments could, he believed, demolish “those cultural features that distinguish modern times from what went before, including a decline of the business enterprise itself.” (In his later writings from the World War I period, Veblen returned to these issues.)
The second future possibility was socialism, which interested Veblen (for the time being) not only as an institutional alternative to the business enterprise but also as a way of economic thinking that nullified the productivity theory of distribution. In cycling back to the phenomenon of socialism, which he had bracketed in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen zeroed in on men and women who held industrial occupations, in which he observed a growing dissatisfaction with the bedrock institutions of the modern age. This discontent was socially concentrated, found not so much among laborers who were “mechanical auxiliaries”—manual extensions—“of the machine process“ but “among those industrial classes who are required to comprehend and guide the processes.” These classes consist of “the higher ranks of skilled mechanics and [of people] who stand in an engineering or supervisory ”“relation to the processes.” Carrying out these jobs, with their distinctive task requirements, inculcates “iconoclastic habits of thought,” which draw men and women into trade unions and, as a next step, “into something else, which may be called socialism, for want of a better term.”
This phrasing was vague even for Veblen, but he felt hamstrung because “there was little agreement among socialists as to a programme for the future,” at least aside from provisions almost “entirely negative.
”
”
Charles Camic (Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics)
“
top research company in Myanmar scene is powerful and different, with a few driving organizations offering thorough types of assistance to organizations looking to comprehend and enter the neighborhood market. Here are a portion of the top exploration firms in Myanmar:
Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR):
Laid out as the main free exploration organization in Myanmar, MSR brags north of 25 years experience. The organization offers an expansive scope of administrations including quantitative and subjective exploration, web-based entertainment research, and CATI (PC Helped Phone Talking) research. MSR is known for its profound comprehension of the nearby market and its capacity to convey experiences across different areas like farming, medical care, and customer products (Statistical surveying Organizations) .
STP Exploration Myanmar:
STP Exploration Myanmar (Single Touch Point Co., Ltd.) works in both market and social examination. With a rich history of leading north of 150 examination projects, STP has shown skill in areas like wellbeing, farming, schooling, and monetary effect evaluations. Their accomplished group offers subjective and quantitative examination administrations, custom fitted to meet the particular necessities and spending plans of their clients (STP Myanmar) .
Aventura Exploration Myanmar (ARM):
ARM gives a far reaching set-up of statistical surveying administrations including brand following, client experience, secret shopping, and B2B research. ARM is especially noted for its imaginative methodology and the utilization of a delegate portable exploration board of more than 85,000 shoppers spread across Myanmar. This permits them to catch continuous bits of knowledge and convey significant outcomes to their clients (ARM) .
Statistical surveying Myanmar by YCP Solidiance:
Under the umbrella of YCP Solidiance, Statistical surveying Myanmar assists organizations with growing in the Burmese market by giving proof based statistical surveying and methodology suggestions. Their administrations incorporate market section and development technique, cutthroat benchmarking, channel model distinguishing proof, and M&A warning. They have major areas of strength for a record of helping global organizations in exploring the neighborhood monetary scene and recognizing manageable learning experiences (Exploration in Myanmar) .
Xavey Exploration Arrangements:
1. Xavey Exploration Arrangements is known for its tech-driven statistical surveying arrangements. They have practical experience in catching "in-the-occasion" bits of knowledge through portable and advanced stages, which is essential for grasping powerful purchaser ways of behaving in Myanmar. Their inventive methodology considers proficient information assortment and examination, settling on them a favored decision for educated clients seeking influence computerized instruments for top research company in Myanmar
2. These organizations feature the top research company in Myanmar
, offering a scope of administrations that take care of different business needs from top to bottom area examinations to constant shopper bits of knowledge. Each firm brings its exceptional assets and procedures, guaranteeing that organizations can track down the right accomplice to assist them with prevailing in the Burmese market. Whether it's through customary subjective techniques or high level advanced procedures, these organizations are exceptional to give the experiences important to informed direction and key preparation.
”
”
top research company in Myanmar
“
Shit,” Amos said. “And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless.” “You want a little ass-play, that’s your business,” Avasarala said.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Babylon's Ashes (Expanse, #6))
“
Everyone leaves unfinished business. That's what dying is.
”
”
The Expanse
“
measures on performance. New transformation projects are planned and delivered each year. During all this time, there has been a steady set of leaders managing the Microsoft–Accenture relationship, which is key for sustaining high performance in this relationship. However, transformational leaders will get bored without new challenges, so long tenures are also associated with growth of the BPO relationship in terms of scope of services, expansion to new locations and continual rounds of innovation.
”
”
Mary Lacity (Nine Keys to World-Class Business Process Outsourcing)
“
The pursuit of growth is the third defining characteristic of entrepreneurial firms. Expansion of any organization, other than government, is a sure sign of its economic value and health. Every entrepreneur wants to “scale” her company to make it bigger, better, faster, and more profitable.
”
”
Carl J. Schramm (Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do)
“
The Importance of an Accountant for Doctors
Managing the financial side of a medical practice can be challenging for doctors who already have demanding schedules. This is why having a specialized accountant is essential for doctors. A qualified accountant can help doctors efficiently manage their financial records, optimize tax strategies, and ensure the overall financial health of the practice, allowing physicians to concentrate on patient care.
Unique Financial Challenges for Doctors
Doctors face unique financial challenges that are specific to the healthcare industry. These include managing income from multiple sources, handling billing systems for patient care, dealing with insurance reimbursements, and navigating complex healthcare regulations. Additionally, doctors often need to invest in high-cost medical equipment and balance personal and business financial planning. Without professional guidance, these financial aspects can become overwhelming. Accountants with expertise in the medical field understand these complexities and can offer valuable support.
The Role of an Accountant in a Medical Practice
A specialized accountant for doctors provides services that go beyond traditional bookkeeping. They help with financial planning, ensuring that the practice’s income and expenses are balanced effectively. Additionally, they manage payroll, tax filing, and compliance with healthcare regulations. Furthermore, an accountant can provide strategic advice on reducing costs and optimizing cash flow, making the practice more efficient and profitable. Doctors also benefit from tax planning services, ensuring that deductions specific to healthcare professionals are maximized while keeping the practice compliant with tax laws.
Benefits of Hiring a Specialized Accountant
By hiring an accountant who specializes in working with doctors, medical professionals can streamline their financial operations and reduce the risk of costly errors. This partnership allows doctors to focus on patient care, knowing that the financial side of their practice is being handled efficiently. Moreover, an accountant can provide financial insights that help doctors plan for the future, such as retirement planning or business expansion.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a specialized accountant is invaluable for doctors who want to ensure the financial success of their practice. With expertise in the unique financial challenges doctors face, accountants provide essential services that allow medical professionals to focus on their patients while maintaining a healthy financial standing.
”
”
sddm
“
Facebook Marketing Course
By taking a Facebook marketing course, you can quickly create a means of income on a huge platform like Facebook. This Facebook marketing course covers a large part of digital marketing. When we talk about social media, we mean Facebook as the biggest online social media platform.
Because every month on average 2.96 billion people around the world actively use Facebook and 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. So think about how much of a platform you are getting for free to promote your business.
Most of us don't know about Facebook's numerous features and tools, or even if we do, we don't know how to use them. Although it is unbelievable, it is true that if we learn the use of those tools, we can easily increase the sales of our website, Facebook page, or e-commerce site many times.
Why learn Facebook Marketing?
The interface we usually see on Facebook is only 20% of Facebook. The remaining 80 percent are in various subdomains of Facebook. In our country, no one can use 99 percent of Facebook. It cannot be said that more than 5% of the mangoes are used by the common people. And spammers can use 10 percent. So today I will discuss how to earn from Facebook by using the maximum of Facebook.
In 2019, Facebook earned $40 million from Facebook ads alone, after paying content creators, bloggers, publishers, and developers. Which has doubled till now. If the calculation includes the amount Facebook pays to those who create content and make videos on Facebook, the amount would be $1 billion.
Have you ever wondered why Facebook gives them so much money? The reason is propaganda. As a result of this campaign, the business expanded. That is not in the words - "propaganda is expansion"! The objective of this Facebook campaign and marketing is to increase sales. The higher the sales, the higher the profit. That's why every company now hires its own social media marketing manager to promote its business and increase sales.
A social media marketing manager's salary ranges from around $500 to $3,000. In other words, Facebook has facilitated the way to do business in social media as well as to get a job.
How many Types of Facebook Marketing?
To know how to use Facebook's features and tools, you need to take a Facebook Marketing Course. Facebook marketing is generally of two types, namely – free Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing. In this case, you can do both types of courses. Facebook free and paid marketing is used according to the type of business.
Free Facebook Marketing
Marketing or advertising on Facebook without spending any money is called Free Facebook Marketing. Let's give an example – “You open a Facebook page for your business, then give it a nice name according to the type of work you do. Then continue to post about your products every day, as well as request your relatives and friends to like your page.
Also, ask them to share your page. Give them a little flattery so that they stay by your side and help grow your page by liking-commenting-sharing, etc etc”. But you don't have to spend any money to do them. This is called Free Facebook Marketing.
Paid Facebook Marketing
On Facebook, those posts that we see under a post (Sponsored) are called paid Facebook marketing. Every company wants everyone to know about their products. So they use paid Facebook marketing in addition to using free Facebook promotion.
It is possible to reach very selective customers by using this paid Facebook marketing. For example, "You want your product's customers to be located within the Dhaka Banani area and for both men and women, and you can also give an age limit that people between so and so age will see my ad or post".
It is natural that you will not get the benefits that you can enjoy in the case of paid Facebook marketing in the case of free. This is why you need to spend money on paid Facebook marketing.
”
”
Bhairab IT Zone
“
success is solely the result of its slow-and-steady approach to growth and expansion. Walmart has undoubtedly flourished for many reasons. Apart from Sam Walton being the founder, though, I don’t know what other factors have led to its success. I can rattle off a list of things from various business books and articles written on Walmart, but I don’t know if they were the cause or the effect of its success. But I do know that taking calculated risks and staying robustly healthy have had a strong correlation with its accomplishments over sixty years.
”
”
Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
“
In this global contest for influence, the skillful flanking maneuver may just tip the scales in favor of the astute player, granting them a crucial edge in this high-stakes game.
”
”
James Scott (The Art of Global Influence: Next-Generation Strategies for Think Tank Expansion and Niche Domination)
“
market research survey in Myanmar– AMT Market Research Myanmar, a nation in Southeast Asia that is rapidly developing, presents numerous business opportunities for both domestic and foreign businesses. However, it is essential to gain a comprehensive understanding of the environment before making strategic business decisions due to the unique socio-economic landscape, consumer behavior, and market conditions. AMT Market Research serves as a reliable partner in this regard, providing Myanmar market research surveys that are comprehensive and insightful.
Why market research survey in Myanmar Is Important Myanmar's economic structure is undergoing significant change due to increased foreign investment, a growing middle class, and rapid urbanization. However, there are difficulties associated with this expansion. Businesses need to know a lot about the local market because of the country's diverse population, changing regulatory landscape, and changing consumer preferences.
In Myanmar, crucial insights into customer requirements, preferences, and purchasing patterns can be gleaned from a well-conducted market research survey. It helps businesses navigate challenges unique to this region, comprehend market trends, and identify potential growth opportunities.
When it comes to conducting surveys for market research survey in Myanmar, AMT Market Research stands out as a leading name. AMT is the ideal partner for businesses seeking actionable insights because it has a team of highly skilled professionals and years of experience and is well-versed in the complexities of the Myanmar market.
Services Provided by AMT Market Research Consumer Behavior and Insights: AMT focuses on gaining an understanding of consumer behavior by collecting information about preferences, purchasing patterns, and the factors that influence decision-making processes. Companies that want to tailor their products or services to local demand need to know this.
Methods for Entering the Market: AMT provides invaluable information regarding competitors, market size, and potential obstacles for businesses wishing to enter the Myanmar market. You can come up with a solid plan for entering and thriving in the local market thanks to their research.
Specific Industry Research: AMT conducts industry-specific market research surveys in Myanmar for businesses in the manufacturing, healthcare, telecom, and retail sectors, among other industries. This aids businesses in comprehending the industry-specific opportunities and threats as well as the competitive landscape.
Positioning and Perception of the Brand: It's important to know how your brand is seen in Myanmar. Businesses can use the insights gained from AMT surveys to improve their market positioning by increasing brand awareness, customer loyalty, and satisfaction.
Solutions for Personalized Research: AMT provides individualized research solutions based on your particular requirements. AMT tailors its research methods to provide the most pertinent and actionable data, regardless of whether you're looking for qualitative insights, quantitative data, or a combination of the two.
What Attracts You to AMT Market Research?
Local Knowledge: AMT Market Research is well-equipped to provide insights that really matter because they have a deep understanding of Myanmar's particular market dynamics.
Complete Information: Because their surveys aim to cover every facet of the market, you'll get a comprehensive picture of the opportunities and challenges.
Relevant Insights: AMT's data is more than just numbers and figures; it also contains meaningful insights that can guide business strategies and decisions.
Timely and dependable reports: AMT's reputation for timely, accurate, and comprehensive reports will keep you ahead of the competition in the Myanmar market.
Businesses looking to establish or expand their presence in Myanmar's emerging market must conduct a market research survey. Y
”
”
market research survey in Myanmar
“
Understanding consumer preferences, market trends, and business opportunities all depend on market research. However, a nuanced approach is required when conducting
market research survey in Myanmar. Participation in surveys and the quality of the data can be significantly influenced by cultural norms, beliefs, and practices. The challenges and opportunities of conducting surveys in this one-of-a-kind cultural landscape are brought to light in this article, which examines the intricate connection between culture and market research in Myanmar. Researchers can gain valuable insights for informed decision-making and successful market strategies by comprehending and adapting to Myanmar's cultural nuances.
Introduction to market research survey in Myanmar is a country with a lot of culture and tradition that makes it a special place to conduct market research. Understanding the cultural nuances that influence survey participation is essential for businesses trying to comprehend consumer preferences and behaviors in this diverse market.
An Overview of Myanmar's Market Research Landscape Market research is rapidly evolving in Myanmar in tandem with the country's economic expansion. In order to gain useful insights from surveys, it is necessary to have a comprehensive comprehension of the cultural dynamics of a population with a wide range of languages and ethnic groups.
Understanding How Culture Affects Survey Participation Culture has a big impact on how people respond to market research surveys. Survey response rates can be influenced by interpersonal dynamics, social norms, and traditional beliefs in Myanmar.
Cultural Factors That Affect Survey Response Rates People's responses to surveys can be influenced by factors like respect for authority, communal decision-making, and communication styles. The key to maximizing survey participation is recognizing and adapting to these cultural differences.
The willingness of respondents to participate in surveys can be influenced by traditional beliefs and practices like face-saving behaviors, hierarchical structures, and superstitions. Researchers can create survey environments that are conducive to honest and valuable feedback by recognizing and respecting these traditional beliefs.
Tailoring Survey Designs to Match Cultural Preferences in Myanmar To guarantee the success of market research surveys in Myanmar, survey designs must be adapted to match cultural norms and preferences. In addition to increasing respondent engagement, this strategy encourages inclusivity and a respect for local customs.
Adjusting Poll Arrangement for Social Awareness
From the language utilized in study inquiries to the visual plan of overview materials, social responsiveness ought to be a core value in forming review surveys. Researchers can increase respondent trust and openness by avoiding potential taboos and including references that are culturally relevant.
Respecting local customs, such as greeting rituals, gift-giving practices, and preferred modes of communication, can increase respondents' willingness to participate in surveys by incorporating them into the design of the survey. Researchers can create a more engaging and culturally appropriate research experience by incorporating these elements into survey design.
Overcoming Language Barriers in Market Research Surveys Myanmar's language diversity makes conducting market research surveys a significant challenge. Language barriers must be overcome and multilingual survey administration must be promoted in order to ensure effective communication and data collection.
Challenges of Myanmar's Language Diversity With over 100 languages spoken there, language barriers can make it hard to take surveys and understand them. Utilizing survey materials that are suitable for a particular language and, if necessary, the services of an interpreter, researchers must overcome these obstacles.
The use of bilingual survey
”
”
market research survey in Myanmar
“
In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. “The executive of the state,” they wrote, was “nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them.
”
”
Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
“
THE LIVING SKIN Summarising, it should be clear by now that the skin is anything but a mere expanse of leather covering the living body. It is itself a living organ of complex function and extraordinary activity. It has to combine many conflicting characteristics: mechanical strength with pliability and elasticity; durability to wear with a high degree of sensitivity; permeability to wastes being driven from the body and impermeability to poisons or micro-organisms seeking entry; regulation of the body's temperature while itself suffering extremes; absorption of beneficial forms of light and automatic adaptation to excessive amounts. In all these activities, it works best when kept busy, being subjected to all manner of variation and handling difficult situations. It is weakened by pampering, deadened by kindness and poisoned by attempts to “feed” it from without. It likes to meet the elements, in as natural and wholesale a form as possible, but welcomes them even in little civilised packets. When it throws waste out, it prefers to be done with it as completely and promptly as possible; it hates to be kept in a sour, greasy, stale atmosphere, held against it by close- fitting, non- porous clothing. It loves to have its surface scraped, scratched and 24
”
”
Anonymous
“
The columnist James Reston quipped that Johnson was “getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn’t tried that yet.” Members of Congress were so overwhelmed Johnson might well have slipped it past them. In a typical year the White House transmits one or two dozen presidential messages to Congress; between January and August 1965, LBJ delivered sixty-five expansive requests for action. “If you’re not doing it to them, they’re doing it to you,” he told an aide, and this was the heart of Johnson’s congressional strategy: keep them busy. Two or three big proposals were not enough to occupy potential troublemakers (and they were all potential troublemakers); Johnson consumed the agendas of even the smallest subcommittees. The president knew his political capital would not last and he acted quickly and relentlessly to spend it. “You’ve got to give it all you can, that first year,” he lectured Harry McPherson. “Doesn’t matter what kind of majority you come in with. You’ve got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves.” It was as if, in the 1950s, Majority Leader Johnson had staged a coup, deposed President Eisenhower, and ruled both branches of government. LBJ was more prime minister than president, and many observers made reference to the parliamentary system in which both branches—executive and legislative—propose, and both dispose. “There is but one way for a President to deal with the Congress,” Johnson later explained,” and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.
”
”
Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade)
“
I’ve come face-to-face with these two questions countless times as a writer, an entrepreneur, a painter, a musician, and even a lawyer. On a more immediate level, the questions relate to the project you’re working on. If you’re a painter creating a collection of work, you may start to feel the questions arise as you explore whether a canvas or the collection is taking shape as you have envisioned it. On a more expansive level, the question emerges in the context of whether you should even be a painter or a writer, a coder, an entrepreneur, a CEO. I’ve seen actors struggle to build careers for decades, never coming close to earning enough to cover their bills. Yet they keep on keeping on, because their big break could be one audition away. And this is what they feel called to do. These are some of the most difficult and defining moments every creator faces. I’ve been told by legendary entrepreneurs, “If you have to ask, assume it’s resistance and soldier on.” They claim that you just know whether or not a project is meant to be. But I’ve witnessed countless people commit to perpetually unsuccessful projects or careers or, on the other side of the spectrum, come a breath away from what would’ve been breakthrough success had they just held on a bit longer. So I began to explore a more systematic process, a set of benchmarks, tests, and questions that might better guide these moments and help people decide whether to keep leaning into the journey, alter their course, or walk away and do something entirely different. We start by asking, “What was your inciting motivation?” What made you undertake this endeavor to begin with. Was it, in some form, the expression of a calling? Was it something to keep you busy? Was it about serving a group of people, solving a problem, or serving up a delight? Was it about money or doing anything you could to get your parents off your back and avoid grad school? Begin by going back to the time surrounding your decision to create whatever it is you’re creating and answer this question. Then move on to the next question. In light of the information and experiences you’ve had along the journey to date, does that original motive still hold true? Are you still equally or even more determined to make it happen? And given what you now know, do you believe you can make it happen?
”
”
Jonathan Fields (Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance)
“
In 1863, as Havana continued to grow, the need for expansion prompted the removal of the city walls. The Ten Years’ War ended with a cease fire from Spain. However, it was followed by the Cuban War of Independence, which lasted from 1895 until 1898 and prompted intervention by the United States. The American occupation of Cuba lasted until 1902. After Cuban Independence came into being, another period of expansion in Havana followed, leading to the construction of beautiful apartment buildings for the new middle class and mansions for the wealthy.
During the 1920’s, Cuba developed the largest middle class per total population in all of Latin America, necessitating additional accommodations and amenities in the capital city. As ships and airplanes provided reliable transportation, visitors saw Havana as a refuge from the colder cities in the North. To accommodate the tourists, luxury hotels, including the Hotel Nacional and the Habana Riviera, were built. In the 1950’s gambling and prostitution became widespread and the city became the new playground of the Americas, bringing in more income than Las Vegas. Now that Cuba senses an end to the embargo and hopes to cultivate a new relationship with the United States, construction in Havana has taken on a new sense of urgency. Expecting that Havana will once again become a tourist destination, the French construction group “Bouygues” is busy building Havana's newest luxury hotel. This past June Starwood’s mid-market Four Points Havana, became the first U.S. hotel, owned by Marriott, to open in Cuba. The historic Manzana de Gómez building which was once Cuba's first European-style shopping arcade has now been transformed into the Swiss based Manzana Kempinski, Gran Hotel, La Habana. It has now become Cuba's first new 5-Star Hotel! Spanish resort hotels dot the beaches east of Havana and China is expected to build 108,000 new hotel rooms for the largest tourist facility in the Caribbean. On the other end of the spectrum is the 14 room Hotel Terral whch has a prime spot on the Malecón.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
The history of every dead and dying “growth” industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.
”
”
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing (with featured article "Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt))
“
The great danger . . . lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things.” What is the danger? It is that familiarity with the things of God will cause you to lose your awe. You’ve spent so much time in Scripture that its grand redemptive narrative, with its expansive wisdom, doesn’t excite you anymore. You’ve spent so much time exegeting the atonement that you can stand at the foot of the cross with little weeping and scant rejoicing. You’ve spent so much time discipling others that you are no longer amazed at the reality of having been chosen to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. You’ve spent so much time unpacking the theology of Scripture that you’ve forgotten that its end game is personal holiness. You’ve spent so much time in strategic, local-church ministry planning that you’ve lost your wonder at the sovereign Planner that guides your every moment. You’ve spent so much time meditating on what it means to lead others in worship, but you have little private awe. It’s all become so regular and normal that it fails to move you anymore; in fact, there are sad moments when the wonder of grace can barely get your attention in the midst of your busy ministry schedule. Artists
”
”
Paul David Tripp (Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry)
“
clustered behind national barriers, what was good for General Motors was good for America. The annual gross domestic product figure meant as much to GM’s American customers as it did to the company. If the US economy grew by 5 per cent, there was a high chance the auto-maker’s bottom line had expanded by a similar amount. America’s median income growth rose in line with GDP. Much the same could have been said of Britain’s ICI, or Rolls-Royce. That is an outmoded way of measuring growth in today’s world. Since 2009, the US economy has expanded by roughly 2 per cent a year. Yet it took until 2015 for the median income to regain the level it enjoyed before the Great Recession. Perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is the wrong word. The median income in 2007 was below what it was in 2002, at the start of the business cycle that lasted for most of George W. Bush’s presidency. What is good for Apple may not be good for America. It shuttered its last US production facility in 2004. The Bush expansion was the first on record where middle-class incomes were lower at the end of it than at the start. Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century. Clearly what the typical American understands by growth differs greatly from that of macroeconomists. GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions. The
”
”
Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism)
“
A clearing of a gravelly throat pulled him from his thoughts. He turned and looked at Thomas, the boat captain, who was seventy if he was a day.
“I think that’s your party there,” the older man said, nodding toward the gravel lot at the end of the dock. If he seemed a bit uncomfortable, Cooper chalked it up to the rather taciturn older man being thrust into what, based on the bits and pieces of the conversations Cooper had overheard while eating breakfast at the café that morning, was the biggest gossip story to hit the Cove in ages. Maybe the boat captain had been secretly hoping Kerry wouldn’t show and he’d be excused from chaperoning duties.
Cooper was too relieved that Kerry had come to get distracted by what the captain was thinking or feeling. He turned around, a welcoming grin on his face, then went completely, utterly still. Even his heart seemed to have stuttered to a stop. Holy jumping mother of--what in the hell was she wearing? He’d just been hoping she’d show at all and assumed he’d have to cajole her out of being annoyed with him for his high-handedness. Again. Only she sure didn’t look annoyed.
She looked…like an edible tray of ripe, luscious fruit. With him being the only guest invited to the bountiful buffet. Sweet Jesus. How was he supposed to keep his hands to himself with her wearing nothing more than a glorified bandana?
She drew closer, and her smile turned a shade smug. She was clearly enjoying his all but cartoon character worthy, goggling reaction. And well, hell, what did she expect? He was a red-blooded male whose bed had remained strikingly empty since her departure. Since long before then, truth be told.
“Hi, Thomas,” she called to the boat captain as she closed the remaining distance between them, still smiling brightly. If she was uncomfortable in her little getup in front of the older man--a man, Cooper supposed, she had to know, given everybody knew everyone in such a small village--she didn’t show it. Instead, she said, “Did they rook you into being our captain today?”
The old man’s cheeks were beet red in a way that had nothing to do with decades of harsh weather. He nodded somewhat tensely. “Did indeed, Miss Kerry. Good to, uh, good to see ya,” he managed to choke out, trying to look anywhere but at the expanse of bare leg and curvy cleavage.
Cooper would have felt sorry for the man, but he was too busy trying to get his own voice back.
”
”
Donna Kauffman (Starfish Moon (Brides of Blueberry Cove, #3))
“
Sweden’s capital is an expansive and peaceful place for solo travellers. It is made up of 14 islands, connected by 50 bridges all within Lake Mälaren which flows out into to the Baltic Sea. Several main districts encompass islands and are connected by Stockholm’s bridges. Norrmalm is the main business area and includes the train station, hotels, theatres and shopping. Őstermalm is more upmarket and has wide spaces that includes forest. Kungsholmen is a relaxed neighbourhood on an island on the west of the city. It has a good natural beach and is popular with bathers. In addition to the city of 14 islands, the Stockholm Archipelago is made up of 24,000 islands spread through with small towns, old forts and an occasional resort. Ekero, to the east of the city, is the only Swedish area to have two UNESCO World Heritage sites – the royal palace of Drottningholm, and the Viking village of Birka. Stockholm probably grew from origins as a place of safety – with so many islands it allowed early people to isolate themselves from invaders. The earliest fort on any of the islands stretches back to the 13th century. Today the city has architecture dating from that time. In addition, it didn’t suffer the bombing raids that beset other European cities, and much of the old architecture is untouched. Getting around the city is relatively easy by metro and bus. There are also pay‐as‐you‐go Stockholm City Bikes. The metro and buses travel out to most of the islands, but there are also hop on, hop off boat tours. It is well worth taking a trip through the broad and spacious archipelago, which stretches 80 kms out from the city. Please note that taxis are expensive and, to make matters worse, the taxi industry has been deregulated leading to visitors unwittingly paying extortionate rates. A yellow sticker on the back window of each car will tell you the maximum price that the driver will charge therefore, if you have a choice of taxis, choose
”
”
Dee Maldon (The Solo Travel Guide: Just Do It)
“
Even in the first morning after the catastrophe began, security teams were calling on Liev’s underlings, sweeping them up for questioning. Some, they held. Others, they released. Burton had no way of knowing which of those who had been set free had cut deals with security and which had been lucky enough to slip through the net. It hardly mattered. That branch of the business had been compromised, and so it would die.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (The Churn (Expanse, #0.2))
“
While the vision he had shown in building Trump Tower remained, the discipline he had summoned to get the skyscraper built evaporated. Emboldened by easy money and a laudatory press, Donald went on a massive and ill-considered shopping spree. Among the projects he juggled was a promising expanse on the West Side on the same turf where Zeckendorf wanted to erect Atomic City, and Donald gave the development-in-waiting an equally retro, Jetsons-like label: Television City. As Donald wheelied along, fine-tuning his performance as the business world’s answer to Evel Knievel, the media lavished whopping reams of attention on him. For the most part, reporters didn’t cover Donald’s ventures because what he did was smart. They covered Donald’s doings because what he did was fun to watch. Whether any of them recognized that what they were watching was a slow-motion car crash didn’t matter. It was the ’80s.
”
”
Timothy L. O'Brien (TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald)
“
Miller closed his terminal, frowning. “Philosophical. But if it’s the price of doing business, what’re we here for?” “Because I thought you… you people had this shit under control. Ever since we stopped paying the Loca, I’ve been able to turn a decent profit. Now it’s all starting up again.” “Hold on,” Miller said. “You’re telling me the Loca Greiga stopped charging protection?” “Sure. Not just here. Half of the guys I know in the Bough just stopped showing up. We figured the cops had actually done something for once. Now we’ve got these new bastards, and it’s the same damn thing all over again.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1))
“
The Union of South Africa divided the functionality of government between Cape Town and Pretoria. Cape Town was the Administrative Capital and Pretoria served as the Legislative Capital. Consequently, many of the politicians divided their time between the two cities and there were always gala events in both cities. Lucia was the perfect hostess at home and the belle of the ball at Events of State and formal holiday parties. The dividing line between the “swells” and those of a lower standing was very apparent. The blacks were at the very bottom of the list and the privileged few were at the top. Apartheid was alive and well! The social structure was very much the same as it was in the American Deep South in Antebellum days and in both cases became accepted as normal. For Uncle Mannie and Aunty Lucia life was beyond good. They lived in a beautiful home and their every need was tended to by their servants, who were always treated well, but were never the less thought of as subservient to them. It was the established way of life and it was just the way it was. Written and unwritten rules regarding their interaction were strict but accepted and no one objected to them. Every day the commuter trains brought the black laborers into the city to work, mostly in the mines. The more privileged Caucasian men planed their ongoing business transactions and expansion in wealth at their exclusive clubs, while their wives socialized, organizing charitable events. Frequently to break the monotony of their daily lives they colluded clandestinely with lovers, thereby enhancing an otherwise affluent but shallow existence.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Media City, Dubai, UAE – Kazema Portable Toilets, one of the leading suppliers of plastic portable toilets, GRP portable toilets and sinks, and other portable sanitation equipment today, this week excitedly announced they have been named a finalist for their entry into the “RSA Customer Focus of the Year Award’ at the Gulf Capital SME Awards 2017.
With all portable products being made from high quality, durable materials that can withstand the demands of sanitation, Kazema Portable Toilets carries a wide variety of ancillary products and accessories designed to assist business owners in earning more.
Now in its 6th year as a regarded small to mid-sized business recognition awards ceremony, the SME Awards proudly identify startups, innovative SMES with exemplary products and services, SMEs which invest in their employees’ environment and customer strategy, and also the visionary entrepreneurs at the helm.
“We’ve created a portable solution that is compatible with any business looking to add depth, expansion, and productivity to their operation,” said Raj, Founder and Owner of Kazema Portable Toilets. “We provide our clients with professional support worldwide that enables them to supply clients locally with our product, as well as harness it for widespread exportation.”
Recognized for their high-stock, ready-to-use durable product today, Kazema Portable Toilets is one of the front-runners for their SME awards category. Kazema beat out hundreds in the category to be regarded as a finalist for their entrepreneurial solution to a problem every person encounters daily.
“We are passionate about our work here at Kazema Portable Toilets, and we are honored to be named a finalist in such a reputable competition,” said Raj. “We want to thank SME for the recognition, and look forward to winning our category.
”
”
Kazema Portable Toilets
“
There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73
”
”
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
“
There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.
”
”
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)