Famous Marketers Quotes

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Don't try to make yourself marketable, you'll be surprised to see yourself at the bottom. Stay incognito, and people will peruse the whole world looking for you, by that time, you'll be at the top.
Michael Bassey Johnson
When we fear what other people think about us, we are frequently more focused on 'being interesting' and less focused on 'taking an interest.' That's why many people talk a great deal when they are anxious and why many people never feel heard. If both people and conversation are trying to be interesting, there is no one left to genuinely listen.
John Yokoyama (When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market)
Assimilate ubiquitously. Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they're false. Examples of this in everyday life: "oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.". Our young men today are being told that women are **, **, things to be **, beaten, **, and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-fours hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.
Henry Barthes
Blame has no purpose, and it is a lousy teacher.
John Yokoyama (When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market)
There is no state of being called "trying".
John Yokoyama (When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market)
A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you. The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’ As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’ So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him. -San Angelo Letters to an Incipient Heretic
Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2))
I can't afford to say yes to all my staff's desires, but one thing is certain – I can't afford the outrageous cost of not listening to their requests.
John Yokoyama (When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market)
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
Andrew Vachss (Mask Market (Burke #16))
As the famous investor Warren Buffet once said: “Never depend on single income.
Jules Marcoux (The Marketing Blueprint: Lessons to Market & Sell Anything)
Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
I must go now." "Stay up the night with me! We'll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We'll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, seashell. Or we'll go to the vegetable market. They've got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we'll go down to Forty-second Street and see the movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan --" "I work tomorrow." "Which has nothing to do with it." "But I'd better go now." "I know this is unheard in America, but I'll walk you home." "I live on Twenty-third Street." "Exactly what I'd hoped. It's over a hundred blocks.
Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)
When you shift conversations and explore the greatness of your team members, you're likely to be a person who creates opportunities for their strength to show up on the job.
John Yokoyama (When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market)
Adolescence is a marketing tool.
Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous (Screenplays))
In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
set off a marketing frenzy, during which the heroine’s name was bestowed upon a hat, several shoe designs, candy, toothpaste, soap, a brand of sausage, and even a town in Florida.
Harold Schechter (Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of)
Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time; He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession. He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme A long while before Queen Victoria's accession. Old Deuteronomy's buried nine wives And more – I am tempted to say, ninety-nine; And his numerous progeny prospers and thrives And the village is proud of him in his decline. At the sight of that placid and bland physiognomy, When he sits in the sun on the vicarage wall, The Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well, of all … Things … Can it be … really! … No! … Yes! … Ho! hi! Oh, my eye! My mind may be wandering, but I confess I believe it is Old Deuteronomy!" Old Deuteronomy sits in the street, He sits in the High Street on market day; The bullocks may bellow, the sheep they may bleat, But the dogs and the herdsman will turn them away. The cars and the lorries run over the kerb, And the villagers put up a notice: ROAD CLOSED — So that nothing untoward may chance to disturb Deuteronomy's rest when he feels so disposed Or when he's engaged in domestic economy: And the Oldest Inhabitant croaks: "Well of all … Things … Can it be … really! … No! … Yes! … Ho! hi! Oh, my eye! My sight's unreliable, but I can guess That the cause of the trouble is Old Deuteronomy!
T.S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats)
When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely: 1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws 2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues 3. Admire themselves for living up to it Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.
John R. Perry (The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing)
Instant Reading. A certain famous Fakir was claiming in the village that he could teach an illiterate person to read by a lightning technique. Nasrudin stepped out of the crowd: 'Very well, teach me – now.' The Fakir touched the Mulla's forehead, and said: 'Now go home immediately and read a book.' Half an our later Nasrudin was back in the market-place, clutching a book. The Fakir had gone on his way. 'Can you read now, Mulla?' the people asked him. 'Yes, I can read – but that is not the point. Where is that charlatan?' 'How can he be a charlatan if he has caused you to read without learning?' 'Because this book, which is authoritative, says: “All Fakirs are frauds”.
Idries Shah (Caravan of Dreams)
In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.
Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man)
For the rest of his life, the greater the chaos, the calmer Rockefeller would become, particularly when others around him were either panicked or mad with greed. He would make much of his fortune during these market fluctuations—because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on today in Warren Buffet’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Rockefeller, like all great investors, could resist impulse in favor of cold, hard common sense.
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
Marketing is bad manners—and I rely on my naturalistic and ecological instincts. Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do if he started boasting of his accomplishments, telling you how great, rich, tall, impressive, skilled, famous, muscular, well educated, efficient, and good in bed he is, plus other attributes? You would certainly run away (or put him in contact with another talkative bore to get rid of both of them). It is clearly much better if others (preferably someone other than his mother) are the ones saying good things about him, and it would be nice if he acted with some personal humility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!
Kim Gordon
There are too many famous Steve Jobs anecdotes to count, but several of them revolve around one theme: his unwillingness to leave well enough alone. His products had to be perfect; they had to do what they promised, and then some. And even though deadlines loomed and people would have to work around the clock, he would regularly demand more from his teams than they thought they could provide. The result? The most successful company in the history of the world and products that inspire devotion that is truly unusual for a personal computer or cell phone.
Ryan Holiday (Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts)
Akerlof wrote a famous paper on this subject called “The Market for Lemons”78—it won him a Nobel Prize. In the paper,
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.
Dominic Sandbrook (The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination)
Keynesian orthodoxy started from the assumption that capitalist markets would not really work unless capitalist governments were willing effectively to play nanny: most famously, by engaging in massive deficit “pump-priming” during downturns.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.
Don Winslow (The Cartel (Power of the Dog #2))
papyruses began to appear on the black market. The Egyptian government tried to prevent the manuscripts from leaving the country. After the 1952 revolution, most of the material was handed over to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and declared part of the national heritage. Only one text eluded them, and this had turned up in an antiquarian shop in Belgium. After vain attempts to sell it in New York and Paris, it was finally acquired by the Carl Jung Institute in 1951. On the death of the famous psychoanalyst, the papyrus, now known as Jung Codex, returned to Cairo, where the
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
So why was Kim Kardashian famous? Because she was very good at marketing herself, that was all - and today, that was enough. Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as "brands". At a time when the 1 percent was getting richer, the 99 percent was suddenly trying to Keep up with the Kardashians.
Nancy Jo Sales (The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World)
No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
step up their game, my goods are off the market. But one bottle of chardonnay later, and my drunken rant has gone viral. I’m the most famous person NOT having sex since the Jonas Brothers put on their purity rings. A men’s magazine has even put a bounty on my (ahem) maidenhead: fifty Gs to whoever makes me break the drought.  Be careful what
Lila Monroe (Bet Me (Lucky in Love, #2))
He would make much of his fortune during these market fluctuations—because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on today in Warren Buffet’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Rockefeller, like all great investors, could resist impulse in favor of cold, hard common sense. One
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)
Marcus Brutus was the original tragic hero of the play ‘Julius Caesar’, Aditya concluded. Perhaps, Shakespeare should have named his play ‘Marcus Brutus’. But then again, it all must have boiled down to saleability and marketing; Julius Caesar being the more famous and thus bankable name. Ironical it was, Aditya smiled. The same Shakespeare had once said-‘What’s in a name...
Anurag Shourie (Half A Shadow)
In the minds of many, one of Winston’s Churchill’s most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”10 But this saying overlooks the fact that the governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.
Bryan Caplan (The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies)
The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.
Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.
Anne Elizabeth Moore (Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity)
Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.
John Mark Comer (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World)
The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.
David A. Stockman (The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America)
broad-based tax cut . . . accommodated by a program of open market purchases . . . would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption.... A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.... Of course . . . the government could . . . even acquire existing real or financial assets. If . . . the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open market operations in private assets.
James Rickards (Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis)
Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
More recently, Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5 Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control. To make a bad problem worse, this is exacerbated by our cultural moment of digital marketing from a society built around the twin gods of accumulation and accomplishment. Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness. They say we see upward of four thousand ads a day, all designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies. Buy this. Do this. Eat this. Drink this. Have this. Watch this. Be this. In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller opined, “It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.”6 Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.
John Mark Comer (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World)
What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto
Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
One of the most famous parts of Bacon's philosophy is his enumeration of what he calls 'idols', by which he means bad habits of mind that cause people to fall into error. Of these he enumerates four kinds. 'Idols of the tribe' are those that are inherent in human nature; he mentions in particular the habit of expecting more order in natural phenomena than is actually to be found. 'Idols of the cave' are personal prejudices, characteristic of the particular investigator. 'Idols of the market-place' are those that have to do with the tyranny of words. 'Idols of the theatre' are those that have to do with received systems of thought; of these, naturally, Aristotle and the scholastics afforded him the most noteworthy instances. Although
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
millions—often more than the budget of the movie itself—studios regularly write off major releases as complete washes. And when they do succeed, no one has any idea why or which of the ingredients were responsible for it. As screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything—even the people in charge. It’s all a big gamble. Which is fine, because their system is designed to absorb these losses. The hits pay for the mistakes many times over. But there is a big difference between them and everyone else in the world. You can’t really afford for your start-up to fail; your friend has sunk everything into her new business; and I can’t allow my book to flop. We don’t have ten other projects coming down the pike. This is it.
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
In your light we see light. —Psalm 36:9 (NIV) ELENA ZELAYETA, BLIND CHEF Without warning at age thirty-six, Elena Zelayeta, pregnant with her second child, totally lost her sight. She had been the chef at a popular restaurant she and her husband owned. A sixty-seven-year-old widow now, she continued to prepare her famous Mexican dishes, marketing them with the help of her two sons, the younger of whom she’d never seen. Typical of San Francisco, it was raining when I arrived at her home. The door was opened by a very short, very broad woman with a smile like the sun. Well under five feet tall, “and wide as I am high,” she said, she led me on a fast-paced tour of the sizable house, ending in the kitchen, where pots bubbled and a frying pan sizzled. Was it possible that this woman who moved so swiftly and surely, who was now so unhesitatingly dishing up the meal she’d prepared for the two of us, really blind? She must see, dimly at least, the outlines of things. At the door to the dining room, Elena paused, half a dozen dishes balanced on her arms. “Is the light on?” she asked. No, she confirmed, not the faintest glimmer of light had she seen in thirty years. But she smiled as she said it. “I hear the rain,” she went on as she expertly carved the herb-crusted chicken, “and I’m sure it’s a gray day for the sighted. But for us blind folk, when we walk with God, the sun is always shining.” Let me walk in Your light, Lord, whatever the weather of the world. —Elizabeth Sherrill Digging Deeper: Ps 97:11; 1 Jn 1:5
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
So these are the possibilities I see with regard to economic forecasts: Most economic forecasts are just extrapolations. Extrapolations are usually correct but not valuable. Unconventional forecasts of significant deviation from trend would be very valuable if they were correct, but usually they aren’t. Thus most forecasts of deviation from trend are incorrect and also not valuable. A few forecasts of significant deviation turn out to be correct and valuable—leading their authors to be lionized for their acumen—but it’s hard to know in advance which will be the few right ones. Since the overall batting average with regard to them is low, unconventional forecasts can’t be valuable on balance. There are forecasters who became famous for a single dramatic correct call, but the majority of their forecasts weren’t worth following.
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It's a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy's most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island's agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
For some years, Trieste was a murky exchange for the commodities most coveted in the deprived societies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. Jeans, for example, were then almost a currency of their own, so terrific was the demand on the other side of the line, and the trestle tables of the Ponterosso market groaned with blue denims of dubious origin ("Jeans Best for Hammering, Pressing and Screwing", said a label I noted on one pair). There was a thriving traffic in everything profitably resellable, smuggleable or black-marketable - currencies, stamps, electronics, gold. Not far from the Ponterosso market was Darwil's, a five-storey jewellers' shop famous among gold speculators throughout central Europe. Dazzling were its lights, deafening was its rock music, and through its blinding salons clutches of thick-set conspiratorial men muttered and wandered, inspecting lockets through eye-glasses, stashing away watches in suitcases, or coldly watching the weighing of gold chains in infinitesimal scales.
Jan Morris (Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere)
Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
He fed the meter, and we walked the short distance to Hannibal's Kitchen, which was famous for its soul food. It was crowded, but we only had to wait fifteen minutes to be seated. Having Dante cook for us spoiled me, but I was always down to try another Gullah-Geechee soul food spot. I ordered the crab and shrimp fried rice and shark steak. Quinton had the rice with oxtails but then begged until I gave him some of my fish. Once we left, we went down East Bay to King Street, stopped in a bookstore, and walked through the City Market. Quinton picked up a pound cake from Fergie's Favorites, and I picked out a beautiful bouquet of flowers fashioned from sweetgrass. Sweetgrass symbolized harmony, love, peace, strength, positivity, and purity. I needed any symbol of those things that I could get. I also thought they'd be a nice peace offering for Mariah. I'd give her a few. We walked to Kaminsky's for dessert. I had their berry cobbler with ice cream. It was served in the ceramic dish it was baked in. I liked the coziness of eating out of a baking dish. The ice cream tasted homemade. The strawberry syrup exploded on my tongue. I didn't make pies, so whenever I had dessert out, I got pie. Quinton had his favorite milkshake and took key lime pie and bourbon pecan pie to go for his mother.
Rhonda McKnight (Bitter and Sweet)
Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.
Michael Lind (The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite)
The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.
Edwin Lefèvre (Reminiscences of a Stock Operator)
In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.
Ann E. Cudd (Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate)
Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
Amazon Kdp
Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue his own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renegades, or, worst of all, apostates (those who abandoned their religion were punishable by death).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
The weight fluctuations of famous women are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line of work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value.
Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
tablespoons, if you’d care to indulge). Will the body composition outcomes be the same? Of course not. Rule #2: The hormonal responses to carbohydrates (CHO), protein, and fat are different. There is no shortage of clinical studies to prove that beef calories7 do not equal bourbon calories. One such study, conducted by Kekwick and Pawan, compared three groups put on calorically equal (isocaloric) semistarvation diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, or 90% carbohydrate. Though ensuring compliance was a challenge, the outcomes were clearly not at all the same: 1,000 cals. at 90% fat = weight loss of 0.9 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% protein = weight loss of 0.6 lbs. per day 1,000 cals. at 90% carbohydrate = weight gain of 0.24 lbs. per day Different sources of calories = different results. Things that affect calorie allocation—and that can be modified for fat-loss and muscle gain—include digestion, the ratio of protein-to-carbohydrates-to-fat, and timing. We’ll address all three. Marilyn Monroe building her world-famous sex appeal. More than 50% of the examples in this book are of women. Marketers have conditioned women to believe that they need specific programs and diets “for women.” This is an example of capitalism at its worst: creating false need and confusion. Does this mean I’m going to recommend that a woman do exactly the same thing as a 250-pound meathead who wants 20-inch arms? Of course not. The two have different goals. But 99% of the time both genders want exactly the same thing: less fat and a bit more muscle in the right places. Guess what? In these
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman)
This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
As Sir Isaac Newton famously confessed after losing a small fortune in the stock market in the early 1700s, "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of peopole.
M.E. Thomas
Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous “20% Time.” “20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes. Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form. This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued. In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken. For example, lack of experimentation in digital media has cost photo brand Kodak nearly $ 30 billion in market capitalization since the digital photography wave overwhelmed it in the late ’90s. The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
I truly believe that if they turned all the pianos in the world to firewood, he would throw himself on top of the bonfire. We have laughed together about how I am famous, not him. But we both know that I look much prettier in a dress than he does, that I play much more photogenically.... I am a "girl," and therefore more marketable. But I know that he is the genius, that he can take the Chopin Etudes and add a touch of magic, a spark, that makes them definitively his own. I also knew that one day the world will recognize this. And I will be happy to take second place. I'm sure my playing has gone from strength to strength because of him. And I adore him. He is my piano. He is my bonfire. And if he were no longer there, I would throw myself on top of that fire willingly.
Lucinda Riley (The Orchid House)
There is a famous parable about a man who lived in a cottage by the sea. Every morning, the man went fishing and caught just enough fish for the day. Afterward, he would spend time playing with his son, take a siesta, and enjoy lunch with his family. In the evening, he and his wife would meet friends at a local bar, where they would tell stories, play music, and dance the night away. One day, a tourist saw the fisherman and his meager catch and asked, “Why do you only catch three or four fish?” “That is all my family needs for today,” the fisherman replied. But the tourist had gone to business school and could not help but offer advice: “You know, if you catch a few more fish and sell them at the market, you could make some extra money.” “Why would I want to do that?” the fisherman asked. “With the extra money you could save up and buy a boat. Then, you could catch even more fish, and make even more money, which you could use to buy an entire fleet of boats!” “Why would I need so many boats?” queried the fisherman. “Don’t you see? With a fleet of boats, you could sell more fish, and with the extra money, you could move to New York, run an international business and sell fish all over the world!” “And how long would this take?” the fisherman asked. “Maybe 10 or 20 years,” the businessman said. “Then what?” the fisherman said. “Then you could sell your company for millions, retire, buy a cottage by the sea, go fishing every morning, take a siesta every afternoon, enjoy lunch with your family, and spend the evenings with friends, playing music and dancing!” How many of us today are like this businessman, blindly chasing what has been in front of us all along?
Tom Shadyac (Life's Operating Manual: With the Fear and Truth Dialogues)
It is especially humbling that the simplest Trotskyist, council communist or anarcho-syndicalist militant saw much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc and of Soviet-style state capitalism had been, however understandable and salutary the sudden East European infatuation with freedom and rights, however promising the fall of the market Stalinist parties, it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes. What was a philosophical construction and idealization in Marx’s Capital—capitalism as a total system, with capital as the only Subject—became a palpable, quotidian reality.
G.M. Tamas
There was a sheep-breeding crisis in Western Australia during the 1940s. Otherwise healthy sheep weren’t getting pregnant or were losing their young before giving birth. Everyone was stumped until some bright agricultural specialists discovered the little culprit—European clover. This type of clover produces a potent phytoestrogen called formononetin as a natural defense against grazing predators. And, yes, if you’re a plant, a sheep is a predator! Accustomed to the humidity of Europe, the imported clover plants were struggling to cope with the drier Australian climate. When clover has a bad year—not enough rain or sunshine, or too much rain or sunshine—it protects itself by limiting the size of the next generation of predators. It increases production of formononetin and prevents the birth of baby grazers by sterilizing their would-be parents. The next time you’re looking for some convenient birth control, you don’t have to snack on a field of clover, of course. But if you take many forms of the famous “Pill,” you’re not doing something all that different. The gifted chemist Carl Djerassi based his development of the Pill on just this kind of botanical birth control. He wasn’t using clover, though; he was using sweet potatoes—the Mexican yam to be exact. He started with disogenin, a phytoestrogen produced by the yam, and from that base, he synthesized the first marketable contraceptive pill in 1951.
Sharon Moalem (Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease)
Apollo had become a trailblazer in the so-called “distress for control” market where it could buy up loans and bonds at steep discounts. When a troubled company restructured its debt, the paper that creditors had accumulated could then be swapped for stock in the reorganized company. If the company then turned around and improved, those credit investors who took on the risk could then make a windfall.
Sujeet Indap (The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street)
Unlike Millstein, the teams from Oaktree and Appaloosa believed there were higher stakes at play. Private equity firms, they believed—best exemplified by Apollo—had become far too abusive of creditors, wielding legal documents and hardball negotiating tactics as swords to take value from loan and bondholders that simply did not belong to them. To Oaktree and Appaloosa, nothing less than the sanctity of the US capital markets was at stake in this room. The
Sujeet Indap (The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street)
Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).
Guillaume Moubeche (The $150M secret)
From Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller: You can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion . . . That must be you. Marketing is your job. It can’t be passed on to someone else. Even if you’re famous, even if you have a million Twitter followers, even if you have a billion dollars to spend . . . it’s still on you and it still won’t be easy. Putting your ass where your heart wants to be means putting it out there where the world can judge it—and doing it in the smartest and most appealing way possible.
Steven Pressfield (Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be)
International. Facing it from Kalakaua, I looked at the totem poles on my left, garishly painted, contorted faces carved upon them. Farther left, and extending from the Avenue into the grounds, was Don the Beachcomber’s Bora Bora Lounge, in which — according to a sign outside it — was the famous Dagger Bar. On my right was the first of many little stores and shops. This one was Polynesian, crammed with idols, wood-carvings, jewelry in glass cases, a model outrigger canoe in the front window. Beyond it, all around and in the Market Place,
Richard S. Prather (Shell Scott PI Mystery Series, Volume Three)
the philosopher George Santayana famously warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Though the institutions of society have difficulty learning from history, individuals can do so.
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
As Paul saw it, the projections, the spreadsheets, the grand marketing plans were all secondary. First, you had to build something that a tiny cohort of users would love. If they loved it, presumably millions of others would, too. And since love tends to be shared, your product or service would have the best kind of marketing, the kind money couldn’t buy—and it would grow and grow. Paul’s point was that in order to build something Brian’s core user would truly love, he needed to meet them where they live—literally. He had to talk to them, listen to them, watch them, and try his best to understand them. And as Paul told Brian, this was the moment to seize that opportunity. “It’s the only time,” Paul said, “you’ll ever be small enough that you can meet all your customers, get to know them—and make something directly for them.” In 2013, Paul would codify this advice in his famous essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” which also serves as #6 of my Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling.
Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs)
A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.) The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?” They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.” The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.” So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.” The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated. As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones. “Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.” So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.
Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2))
The Irish examples are particularly ancient and justifiably famous, as they display some of the most intricate and well-preserved reliefs. Conceivably modeled after smaller objects of wood or metal, their purpose is unclear. Some scholars believe they were intended to identify a particularly holy place, such as a saint’s grave. Others argue that they marked monastery foundations, distinguished boundaries, and graves or simply served as devotional monuments or village landmarks (for example, market crosses).
Robin M. Jensen (The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy)
Thomas Watson from IBM famously said: “Nothing happens until a sale is made.
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
To address such concerns, major breweries had started hiring “travellers,” men who would literally travel to places where the product was being sold to check on the quality. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Guinness had employed several such men, including J. C. Haines, himself a former brewer, who traveled the London region for Guinness in the 1890s. Haines also became a Guinness “World Traveller,” making trips to Europe and the Middle East, as well as to Australia. Perhaps the most famous Guinness World Traveller was Arthur T. Shand, a former World Traveller for British ale brewer Allsopp, who was hired by Guinness in 1898. For the next 15 years, until the eve of World War I, the tireless Shand traveled throughout the United States and Canada, and also made visits to Latin America, South Africa, and Australia, which was the largest market for Foreign Extra Stout until eclipsed by the United States in 1910.
Bill Yenne (Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint)
Innovation amateurs talk good ideas,” he says. “Innovation experts talk testable hypotheses,” A hypothesis, embodied as a prototype, beats market research because it can be tested. The word prototype comes from the Greek words protos and typos, meaning “first form.” Customers don’t have to imagine how they would feel when they see a prototype. They’re already feeling it. Steve Jobs, although famous for rejecting market research, insisted that Apple designers make and test hundreds of prototypes before deciding on the final form of a new product.
Marty Neumeier (Brand Flip, The: Why customers now run companies and how to profit from it (Voices That Matter))
Double-entry accounting was popularized in Europe toward the end of the fifteenth century, and most scholars believe it set the table for the flowering of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern capitalism. What is far less well understood is the why. Why was something as dull as bookkeeping so integral to a complete cultural revolution in Europe? Over nearly seven centuries, “the books” have become something that, in our collective minds, we equate with truth itself—even if only subconsciously. When we doubt a candidate’s claims of wealth, we want to go to his bank records—his personal balance sheet. When a company wants to tap the public markets for capital, they have to open their books to prospective investors. To remain in the market, they need accountants to verify those books regularly. Well-maintained and clear accounting is sacrosanct. The ascendance of bookkeeping to a level equal to truth itself happened over many centuries, and began with the outright hostility European Christendom had to lending before double-entry booking came along. The ancients were pretty comfortable with debt. The Babylonians set the tone in the famous Code of Hammurabi, which offered rules for handling loans, debts, and repayments. The Judeo-Christian tradition, though, had a real ax to grind against the business of lending. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” Deuteronomy 23:19–20 declares. “In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God,” Ezekiel 22:12 states. As Christianity flourished, this deep anti-usury culture continued for more than a thousand years, a stance that coincided with the Dark Ages, when Europe, having lost the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, also lost nearly all comprehension of math. The only people who really needed the science of numbers were monks trying to figure out the correct dates for Easter.
Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
it's rather interesting because one of the greatest economists of the world is a substantial shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and has been from the very early days after Buffett was in control. His textbook always taught that the stock market was perfectly efficient and that nobody could beat it.But his own money went into Berkshire and made him wealthy. So, like Pascal in his famous wager, he hedged his bet.The iron rule of life is that only twenty percent of the people can be in the top fifth Is the stock market so efficient that people can't beat it? Well, the efficient market theory is obviously roughly right-meaning that markets are quite efficient and it's quite hard for anybody to beat the market by significant margins as a stock picker by just being intelligent and working in a disciplined way.Indeed, the average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market.
Peter D. Kaufman (Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition)
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Many famous motivational speakers and influencers will tell you that you can get whatever you want in life but I will never tell you that. Do you know who else would not say that? Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. But people love to be lied to and love entertaining fantasies, so they say I'm the one who doesn't know enough and that's why my thinking is limited. Well, have they tried to sell anything on a Chinese website or through an American or Canadian platform like Shopify? Many even tell me they plan to start their business using WordPress, which shows how ignorant they are of what their dreams need to become true. In reality, as soon as you start going through these paths you will see that you are stopped along the way. Many apps don't work in your country, and many markets are also not open to you due to location. In other cases, they claim to investigate you before deciding if you should have access to their features, while what they do is to simply look at your IP address. This happens to any industry, including the book industry.
Dan Desmarques
The few steps that connect strangers explain how rumors spread rapidly and widely. If you have a good investment idea, you might want to keep it secret. In 1998 a New York Times Science Times article said that mathematicians had discovered how networks might “make a big world small” using the equivalent of the famous person idea, and attributed the concept of six degrees of separation to a sociologist in 1967. Yet all this was known to Claude Shannon in 1960.
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
Interstate 290 cuts past Chicago’s Rush University hospital and then through the city’s near Southwest Side. Adjacent to the expressway, homeless people and others suffering from opioid-use disorders do deals and shoot up, and the highway also provides quick access for affluent people from the suburbs. “They serve you in your car, quick-out in under a minute, and you’re back home in Hinsdale before the kids wake,” Jack Riley, ex–special agent in charge of the DEA’s Chicago office, told Rolling Stone. “That’s why gangsters kill for those corners. They’re the Park Place and Boardwalk of the drug game.” To Chicago residents, 290 is better known as the Eisenhower Expressway or, to many, the Heroin Highway. Chicago’s famously high murder rate, which police say is driven by drug dealing on the West Side, all comes to a head near the Heroin Highway, in drug markets on streets like Independence Boulevard.
Ben Westhoff (Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic)
As Jen Campbell points out in The Bookshop Book, following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the first ‘mass market’ books becoming available, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his shop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.
Shaun Bythell (The Diary of a Bookseller)
Peter Drucker is famously quoted as saying that the two basic functions of every business are marketing and innovation.
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
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1. Sri Lanka’s Cultural and Historical Richness "Sri Lanka is a place where history lives in harmony with the present. From ancient temples to colonial fortresses, every corner of this island tells a story." Sri Lanka’s history stretches over 2,500 years, featuring incredible landmarks like the Sigiriya Rock Fortress and Anuradhapura's ancient ruins. The country is also home to the famous Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, an important religious site for Buddhists around the world. Each historic site tells a different story, making Sri Lanka a treasure trove of cultural and spiritual experiences. Find out more about planning a visit here. ________________________________________ 2. Nature’s Bounty and Biodiversity "In Sri Lanka, nature isn't merely observed; it's experienced with all the senses — from the scent of spice plantations to the sight of vibrant tea terraces and the sound of waves on pristine beaches." Sri Lanka’s national parks, like Yala and Udawalawe, are among the best places to see elephants, leopards, and a diverse range of bird species. The island’s ecosystems, from rainforests to coastal mangroves, create an incredible array of landscapes for nature lovers to explore. For those planning to visit these natural wonders, start your journey with a visa application. ________________________________________ 3. Sri Lankan Hospitality and Warmth "The true beauty of Sri Lanka is found in its people — hospitable, welcoming, and ready to share a smile or story over a cup of tea." The warmth of Sri Lankans is a common highlight for visitors, whether encountered in bustling cities or quiet villages. Tourists are frequently invited to join meals or participate in local festivities, making Sri Lanka a welcoming destination for international travelers. To experience this hospitality firsthand, ensure you have the right travel documents, accessible here. ________________________________________ 4. Beaches and Scenic Coastal Areas "Sri Lanka’s coastline is a place where sun meets sand, and every wave brings with it a sense of peace." With over 1,300 kilometers of beautiful coastline, Sri Lanka offers something for everyone. The south coast is famous for relaxing beaches like Unawatuna and Mirissa, while the east coast’s Arugam Bay draws surfing enthusiasts from around the globe. To enjoy these beaches, start by obtaining a Sri Lanka visa. ________________________________________ 5. Tea Plantations and the Hill Country "The heart of Sri Lanka beats in the hill country, where misty mountains and lush tea plantations stretch as far as the eye can see." The central highlands of Sri Lanka, with towns like Ella and Nuwara Eliya, are dotted with tea plantations that produce some of the world’s finest teas. Visiting a tea plantation offers a chance to see tea processing and sample fresh brews, with the cool climate adding to the serene experience. Secure your entry to the hill country with a visa application. ________________________________________ 6. Sri Lankan Cuisine: A Feast for the Senses "In Sri Lanka, food is more than sustenance — it’s an art form, a burst of flavors that range from spicy curries to sweet desserts." Sri Lankan cuisine is a rich blend of spices and textures. Popular dishes like rice and curry, hoppers, and kottu roti offer a true taste of the island. Food tours and local markets provide immersive culinary experiences, allowing visitors to discover the flavors of Sri Lanka. For a trip centered on food and culture, start your journey here.
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So many people were basing decisions on Granville’s forecasts in the early 1980s that when he said something was going to happen, it happened because they believed it would. That is, when he said the market would go down, the prediction scared buyers out of the market – and lo, it went down. This happened early in 1981, when Granville told his disciples to sell everything. The day after this famous warning was issued, the stock market fell out of bed – 23 points on the Dow. All of Wall Street said ooh and ah. What a powerful prophet was this Granville! The plunge was brief but impressive while it lasted.
Max Gunther (The Zurich Axioms: The rules of risk and reward used by generations of Swiss bankers)
One of their most famous coups was underwriting a $10 million loan for a growing mail-order house called Sears, Roebuck, headed by Goldman's distant relative. It was the first time a mail-order security had ever been on the market-a calculated risk, but one that paid off.
Kenneth L. Fisher (100 Minds That Made the Market (Fisher Investments Press Book 23))
Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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