Flaws Money Quotes

Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.

If we truly love ourselves, in spite of our flaws, then we can love others in spite of theirs.

But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.

The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.... Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

Sometimes it took a dog with stinky breath and bad manners to help us see what really counts in life. Despite all his flaws, Marley had given us a gift that no amount of money could buy. He gave us the gift of total, complete love. He taught us how to give it and how to accept it. When you have love, most of the other pieces fall into place.

Power. It's all about that, don't you forget. People want money or power.

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.

There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said, meditatively. “But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head—round and round continually.” He made a circular motion with his hands. “And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes—not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep—the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows –a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand up, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be and end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously n some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying; it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.

more money will often not solve the problem. In fact, it may compound the problem. Money often makes obvious our tragic human flaws, putting a spotlight on what we don’t know. That is why, all too often, a person who comes into a sudden windfall of cash—let’s say an inheritance, a pay raise, or lottery winnings—soon returns to the same financial mess, if not worse, than the mess they were in before.

Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a pack between his lips. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that, oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.” “A hamartia?” he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately. “A fatal flaw,” I explained, turning away from him.

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.

Every money message we hold on to contains a fatal flaw; it impressions us in an incomplete world.

Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism—and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. “We know how to cure this,” as Brad had put it. “It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you! How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else. …) The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful. Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it. When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor(…)He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility. (…) And what are bricks worth anyway? What matters is the promise of Christ, what matters is the cement that unites the bricks, which is the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit is capable of building the church with such poorly moulded bricks as are we. And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church…this in reality am I .(…) The deep bond between God and His Church, is an intimate part of each one of us. (…)To each of us God says, as he says to his Church, “And I will betroth you to me forever” (Hosea 2,21). But at the same time he reminds us of reality: 'Your lewdness is like rust. I have tried to remove it in vain. There is so much that not even a flame will take it away' (Ezechiel 24, 12). But then there is even something more beautiful. The Holy Spirit who is Love, sees us as holy, immaculate, beautiful under our guises of thieves and adulterers. (…) It’s as if evil cannot touch the deepest part of mankind. He re-establishes our virginity no matter how many times we have prostituted our bodies, spirits and hearts. In this, God is truly God, the only one who can ‘make everything new again’. It is not so important that He will renew heaven and earth. What is most important is that He will renew our hearts. This is Christ’s work. This is the divine Spirit of the Church.

Looking back on the fifty years since I first became aware of its flaws, the word that summarizes my feelings about Neoclassical economics today is that it is, as Marx once described the proto-Neoclassical Jean-Baptiste Say, ‘dull’ [...] Its vision of capitalism at its best is a system manifesting the harmony of equilibrium, where everyone is paid their just return (their ‘marginal product’), growth is occurring smoothly at a rate that maximizes social utility through time, and everyone is motivated by consumption – rather than accumulation and power – because, to quote Say, ‘the producers, though they have all of them the air of demanding money for their goods, do in reality demand merchandise for their merchandise’ [...] What a bland picture of the complex, changing world in which we live!

The fact that it took me eleven years to become an overnight success should also reassure him. It’s not my fault success has brought my unseemly arrogance and braggadocio to the surface: I was always thus tainted, but when you’re poor and unsuccessful it’s just vulgar ostentation to flaunt such character flaws: success wears very badly on me: I’m a sore winner. But those who have known and loved me through the Dismal Swamps of all the lies that are my life will testify that it is not merely the acquisition of pocket money that has made me an elitist. The seeds were always present. Only becoming a Writer of Stature has made them flower.

I’ve known several men who believe women are only interested in relationships for money and comfort, and they aren’t capable of really loving. And I’ve known women who insist men only want sex and don’t know how to love. White people used to insist that blacks weren’t capable of ‘noble’ emotions, that they were little more than animals. The same was said about Jews, Native Americans, you name it. It’s an ancient argument. People keep dredging it up, trying to prove to themselves that people they don’t understand are alien and don’t warrant being treated well. And it is always—always—wrong. Despite our differences, all people are basically built from the same template. We are all equally admirable and equally flawed.

Shame Resilience 101 Here are the first three things that you need to know about shame: We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. We’re all afraid to talk about shame. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives. Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable—it’s the total opposite of owning our story and feeling worthy. In fact, the definition of shame that I developed from my research is: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.1 Shame keeps worthiness away by convincing us that owning our stories will lead to people thinking less of us. Shame is all about fear. We’re afraid that people won’t like us if they know the truth about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, how much we’re struggling, or, believe it or not, how wonderful we are when soaring (sometimes it’s just as hard to own our strengths as our struggles). People often want to believe that shame is reserved for the folks who have survived terrible traumas, but this is not true. Shame is something we all experience. And while it feels as if shame hides in our darkest corners, it actually tends to lurk in all of the familiar places, including appearance and body image, family, parenting, money and work, health, addiction, sex, aging, and religion. To feel shame is to be human.

I didn't invent the difficulty of depending on people. It's not a personality flaw of mine. The message is everywhere. The air is saturated with it -- independence and strength and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (an image that is by its very nature impossible.) "Take complete responsibility for your life," they say, as if the external forces don't matter at all. As if it all comes down to personal effort and attitude. As if money, support, and privilege had nothing to do with how your life turns out.

…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it. The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

turns to me and reaches over, curling his hand around the back of my neck and bringing me in close. “I have a lot of shit to say to you, and I think it needs to be said before we start this for real again. The first of those things is I’m so fucking sorry, baby. For the way I treated you, for the things I did, for the money I took. I was suffering and you tried to help, but I pushed you away. I can’t change that, but I’m sorry, from the bottom of my soul.” “I know you are,” I say, cupping his jaw. “And I’m sorry too, for not fighting harder, for not realizing something

And there you have your Founders and Framers in all their elite glory—the 1 percent of their time. Many spent more than they made. Struggled their entire lives with debt. And, when they could, always married into money. They were—obvious to say—petty, flawed, inconsistent, and all too human. Yet compared to many of our feckless lawmakers of today,XV those rich white guys were indeed like demigods come from Mount Olympus to walk the Earth. Or at least the streets of Philadelphia. Not merely politicians, they were (collectively) inventors, architects, scientists, linguists, and scholars who had studied Greek and Latin; who read Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. More interestingly, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume read them.XVI They were eloquent orators and brilliant writers. They wrote books, political articles, essays, and long, philosophical letters to their wives, friends, and to one another.XVII So who were those guys? They were men of the Enlightenment who valued reason over dogma, tolerance over bigotry, and science over faith. And, unlike the current Right-Wing doomsayers and fearmongers, they were all, truly, apostles of optimism.

What freedom are we to find when our restless minds are enslaved under the chains of human trafficking? What freedom do we preach when our females breathe through enraged wounds? They are used and abused, left in caves alienated and bruised. What is this language we speak of when we talk about the law, since the human right clause is ignored and flawed? Whom is it protecting because here we are protesting? Isn't this law ought to save the bodies of young females? Isn't this law ought to be brave and remove females from sex frames? Instead, it chooses for women and children to die leaving their loved ones with no goodbyes. Human trafficking, I say, has made enough money for the day.

In the mid-1970s, players did not fraternize before games; in fact, oftentimes they genuinely did not like each other or resented one another’s success. It was before the modern big-money era of baseball when the players, each flush with cash and the accouterments of prosperity, began treating each other as coworkers and comrades in a billion-dollar enterprise.

The allowance vanished absolutely; and in its place there came into being an arrangement. By this, his lordship was to have whatever money he wished, but he must ask for it, and state why it was needed. If the request were reasonable, the cash would be forthcoming; if preposterous, it would not. The flaw in the scheme, from his lordship's point of view, was the difference of opinion that can exist in the minds of two men as to what the words reasonable and preposterous may be taken to mean. Twenty pounds, for instance, would, in the lexicon of Sir Thomas Blunt, be perfectly reasonable for the current expenses of a man engaged to Molly McEachern, but preposterous for one to whom she had declined to remain engaged. It is these subtle shades of meaning that make the English language so full of pitfalls for the foreigner.

Wences had first learned about Bitcoin in late 2011 from a friend back in Argentina who thought it might give Wences a quicker and cheaper way to send money back home. Wences’s background in financial technology gave him a natural appreciation for the concept. After quietly watching and playing with it for some time, Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked Wences for more time and money. Wences ended up giving them $150,000 more, sent in Bitcoins. In October they concluded that the basic Bitcoin protocol was unbreakable, even if some of the big companies holding Bitcoins were not. By

The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones... This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try. So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to. I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation. But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right. It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth. I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress. We are imperfect because we are unfinished. So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be? How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others? I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion. I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display.. Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love.. And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.

These two flaws meant that the gold standard was always vulnerable to a run on gold in any country where circumstances might lead a large enough percentage of the population to demand redemption of their paper money in gold. The fatal flaw of the gold standard at the heart of these two problems was that settlement in physical gold is cumbersome, expensive, and insecure, which meant it had to rely on centralizing physical gold reserves in a few locations—banks and central banks—leaving them vulnerable to being taken over by governments.

What we're ultimately looking for are feelings. We want more money to get a sense of security and peace. We want to spend time with our family because it makes us feel so much love and joy. We want to do what we love because it gives us a sense of fulfillment inside. These are all ultimately feelings that we are trying to get, but we keep thinking that the goal or object we want will give us those feelings. This idea is inherently flawed because our feelings can only ever be generated from within us, not from external things. External things can prompt us to create the feelings, but ultimately it is us that produces those feelings from within ourselves.

The greed manifests us in many shapes, The high rise building, a big house , deforestation, no land to grow and no land to feed our own, Our very own People ! The money was deadly than any plague, People bought and sold people like a commodity ! and then , They divided us , according to our flawed faith..... The stench of ignorance fills the air, nestling at the base of our cortex . I refuse to be conquered ! The agenda was all clear from the start, Prospect of the land; they would rather see us disappear, Sold for seventy five lac a 100 years back‎, It's seventy five million wounds and every day to cry !! We are a " numb nation " We are a " slave nation " & I refuse to be conquered !!!

The Sherwood Forest Chronicles . 1. If Robin Hood steals from the rich, doesn't that make them poor? Does he give them their money back? I mean, what the point of robbing to begin with if your mission statement is logically flawed? 2. If the Sheriff of Nottingham is such an asshole, why isn’t he the Prime Minister of Nottingham? 3. Why don’t I see elves here? Did all the elves of Sherwood Forest migrate to New Zealand to become extras on the Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films? 4. Does Little John even know what an oxymoron is? 5. If Smokey the Bear came to Sherwood Forest to make a public service announcement about preventing forest fires, would he leave with arrows in his ass or would the Merry Men feast on bear meat for several days? And what makes the Merry Men merry in the first place? 6. What do you think? Does Robin Hood shop at Walmart or Target?

(Before the twentieth century was out that could be worded, “—most people can’t read.” One of the things I learned in studying the histories of my home planet and century on various time lines was that in the decline and fall that took place on every one of them there was one invariant: illiteracy. In addition to that scandalous flaw, on three time lines were both drug abuse and concurrent crime in the streets, plus a corrupt and spendthrift government. My own time line had endless psychotic fads followed by religious frenzy; time line seven had continuous wars; three time lines had collapse of family life and marriage—but every time line had loss of literacy…combined with—riddle me this—more money per student spent on education than ever before in each history. Never were so many paid so much for accomplishing so little. By 1980 the teachers themselves were only semiliterate.)

There is an old question, rarely voiced these days, but nevertheless running as an undercurrent beneath the squabbles and misunderstandings that occur in households, workplaces and universities on a daily basis. ‘What do women want?’ has been asked in a bewildered, almost exasperated, tone since women first began to say they wanted more. Yet the answer seems to us to be simple and entirely self-evident. Women want what all sentient human beings want. They want to develop their own talents and put them to good use, to earn and control their own money so they can be truly independent and make free choices. They want to gain status and respect as they prove to be worth of it. To love and to be loved as free and equal adults, to be allowed their human flaws and foibles and not to be unfairly judged for them, and to be forgiven when they fail, behave badly or have trouble coping. To be the subject and not the object. They want, in short, what men want.

Emma, calm down. I had to know-" I point my finger in his face, almost touching his eyeball. "It's one thing for me to give your permission to look into it. But I'm pretty sure looking into it without my consent is illegal. In fact, I'm pretty sure everything that woman does is illegal. Do you even know what the Mafia is, Galen?" His eyebrows lift in surprise. "She told you who she is? I mean, who she used to be?" I nod. "While you were checking in with Grom. Once in the Mob, always in the Mob, if you ask me. How else would she get all her money? But I guess you wouldn't care about that, since she buys you houses and cars and fake IDs." I snatch my wrist away and turn back toward our hotel. At least, I hope it's our hotel. Galen laughs. "Emma, it's not Rachel's money; it's mine." I whirl on him. "You are a fish. You don't have a job. And I don't think Syrena currency has any of our presidents on it." Now "our" means I'm human again. I wish I could make up my mind. He crosses his arms. "I earn it another way. Walk to the Gulfarium with me, and I'll tell you how." The temptation divides me like a cleaver. I'm one part hissy fit and one part swoon. I have a right to be mad, to press charges, to cut Rachel's hair while she's sleeping. But do I really want to risk the chance that she keeps a gun under her pillow? Do I want to miss the opportunity to scrunch my toes in the sand and listen to Galen's rich voice tell me how a fish came to be wealthy? Nope, I don't. Taking care to ram my shoulder into him, I march past him and hopefully in the right direction. When he catches up to me, his grin threatens the rest of my hissy fit side, so I turn away, fixing my glare on the waves. "I sell stuff to humans," he says. I glance at him. He's looking at me, his expression every bit as expectant as I feel. I hate this little game of ours. Maybe because I'm no good at it. He won't tell me more unless I ask. Curiosity is one of my most incurable flaws-and Galen knows it. Still, I already gave up a perfectly good tantrum for him, so I feel like he owes me. Never mind that he saved my life today. That was so two hours ago. I lift my chin. "Rachel says I'm a millionaire," he says, his little knowing smirk scrubbing my nerves like a Brillo pad. "But for me, it's not about the money. Like you, I have a soft spot for history." Crap, crap, crap. How can he already know me this well? I must be as readable as the alphabet. What's the use? He's going to win, every time.

If the hunger for paradise is wired into your heart (and it is), either you will realize that this present life has been designed as a preparation for the paradise to come, or you will do your best and work your hardest to turn the present moment into the paradise it will never be. You and I live in a broken world that right now will not be the paradise we seek. You and I are flawed people, living with flawed people, and collectively we have no ability whatsoever to deliver paradise to one another. Every place you go and every created thing you handle has been damaged by the fall. This simply is not and won’t be the paradise you seek. For all who have placed their trust in the Savior, paradise is a secure reality. The paradise for which your heart longs is coming, but you will not experience it right here, right now. No, God has chosen to keep you in this broken world in order to use its brokenness to prepare you for what is to come. The brokenness you live in the middle of, and the difficulties you face there, are not in the way of God’s good plan for you; they are an important ingredient in it. Right now, God is not so much working to change your surroundings but to change you so that you are ready for the new surroundings he has planned and purchased for you in his grace. Simply said, either you are waiting by faith for the paradise to come, or you are working with your hands to build paradise in the here and now. Looking for paradise in the here and now is another ingredient of the money madness inside many of us and has overtaken the culture around us. We frenetically spend on material things, physical experiences, and new locations in the search of a piece of paradise. Our hearts long for the freedom from external difficulty and internal emptiness that we so often feel. We instinctively know that there must be more, that this can’t be it. Deep within us we feel like we’re missing something. So in our eternity amnesia we don’t lift up our eyes to look afar and consider the glories that are coming. No, we open our wallets and look around at what may have the potential to give us the paradise we are seeking. And because nothing can deliver it, we spend from thing to thing to thing, hoping that the next thing will deliver. But we don’t end up with paradise. We end up with houses that are bigger and more luxurious than we need, cars that are more identity markers than means of transportation, a pile of possessions, many of which lie unused, amassed debt, and wallets that are empty. But the paradise that we’ve spent to get has eluded us. Sure, budgets are helpful, but only if they are a piece of handling our money with eternity in view. When it comes to money, the PMP that lives inside us and that has captured our culture just cannot work. It will cause you to spend too much, it will tempt you to spend unwisely, and for all of your investment, it will leave you empty in the end.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

only the dead keep secrets." "it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required." "most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all." "a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness." "someone always gains, just like someone always loses." "most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? " " enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. " " there was no stopping what one person could believe. " " I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. " " I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. " " luck is a matter of probabilities. " "you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. " " ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. " " an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. " " the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. " " humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. " " she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. " " conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. " " what replace feelings when there were none to be had? " " the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. " "To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight." "apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined." "there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck." "no life without death?" "Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.

I love myself and all my flaws. I realize that my uniqueness is what makes me great.

The most treacherous form of evil is often invisible. This form can shift to engage it can take on the appearance and expectation of justice and goodness. It will play on your sense of belonging it will make you think you're doing everything right it will make you think it's doing everything right it will make you believe that it cares for you it will raise its arms in exaltation it will use captivating language it will be fueled by power and money and control and when it sweeps in and fills a system of justice it will be nearly impossible to nail down because such a system is not inherently evil and therefore not every piece and part of its giant apparatus will necessarily be out for blood. Some parts will be good, some people will be good, and that goodness will keep us hopeful and when we're hopeful we're most easily blinded. We're most likely to ignore discrepancies or to blame individuals or groups for their own fate when the inherently good system points itself at them and devastates their lives. With hope, we can feel that we're legitimately teaching our children that it's all good and that it's all about justice and that it's all about making things right. And then those children will grow up. Like you, many of them will have ingrained beliefs about the way things are. You will take justice for granted you will believe that any historic or current flaws in the system are or will be naturally self-correcting you will believe that people who work for justice are actually and honestly working for justice you will believe that the people who work for justice are deeply and unwaveringly working to protect children and human rights and equality. You will be wrong.

Those who are coming from the gutters know that from time to time a piece of us will break off and float back to the floor from whence it came. Wealth can gray your eyes at the edges, money does not make you hover above human qualities, you are only a flawed being with much material gain.

There is always home, sweet home. As an insurance policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar is very far from being as safe as houses.

... was the influence all this money exerted, not just on the political process but on people's decisions about what to do with their lives. The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets-- and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life. And then there is maybe the greatest cost of all: Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. p.266

Sound. No matter how great a movie looks, if the audience can’t understand what the actors are saying, they’ll get frustrated and lose interest quickly. I know when I see a low-budget movie and the sound is crummy, I shut it off. The less money you have, the less you’ll probably budget for postproduction sound, so what you get during the shoot becomes even more important. Don’t scrimp here. If your production sound is good enough, you won’t need a lot of ADR (additional dialogue recording), which most of the time you need because there’s a flaw in the production sound, or an airplane was overhead and you couldn’t get a clean take. Your sound person should scout your locations. If you’re going to be shooting on a weekday and you visit on a weekend, make sure that there isn’t a noisy garage next door that’s only open Monday to Friday. Sometimes you do ADR because you want to change the performance. That’s fine, but I can usually tell when an actor has been looped, and I hate it, and so do many directors. Some actors are hopelessly bad at it—they’re never able to dub themselves in a convincing way. The best reason to use ADR is when you want to fill in a scene where lots of people are talking at once.

Dr. Sullivan never asked me about Carl. Even if he had, I would have given him the same filtered explanation that any other child would have. Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered. Even if I had trusted Dr. Sullivan, I didn’t have a grip on the reality of Carl. My stepfather wasn’t a villain. Yes, he was an alcoholic. He was chronically selfish and flamboyant with his money. He was negligent. He was a cliché trailer salesman with a silver tongue that made trash seem like treasure. He was highly inappropriate in ways that, without him even knowing, would permanently tatter my developing mind. But none of these flaws were potent enough to do the real damage. Carl never loved me. I think he wanted to. And I think by his standards, he tried. Carl did everything for me that would pass him as a socially acceptable parent. But a child can hear silent rejection.

If there is one fatal flaw in this business, it is allowing isolated information to drive trading or investing decisions-committing money without understanding all the risks. And there is only one way to understand all the risks: through systematic knowledge.

Perhaps the most famous, if flawed, oracle of the Federal Reserve, former chairman Alan Greenspan, knew that money was something that not only central bankers could create. In a speech in 1996, just as the Cypherpunks were pushing forward with their experiments, Greenspan said that he imagined that the technological revolution could bring back the potential for private money and that it might actually be a good thing: “We could envisage proposals in the near future for issuers of electronic payment obligations, such as stored-value cards or ‘digital cash,’ to set up specialized issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and public credit ratings.

I see professional advisors cold-call perfect strangers rather than do a call rotation for existing clients. I see advisors do prospecting seminars rather than a client advisory council or client appreciation event, and I see advisors run advertising campaigns rather than network with existing strategic allies and other professional influencers. “Spray and pray” marketing strategies are flawed on so many levels. Why, then, do so many advisors still attempt them? The reason for this is simple; nurturing existing relationships and other tried and true strategies can be boring and rarely results in instant gratification. Too many advisors want to find the next “new idea”, something with some “sizzle”, and, as a result, are continually searching for and dabbling with concepts that ultimately have minimal impact. It’s not unlike investing. How many times have you seen someone try to hit a home-run with a high-risk investment opportunity rather than stick with a methodical long-term approach? It’s not just money that compounds. As I’ve said before, discipline compounds, too. You have to be patient and let your efforts gather momentum. Too many advisors get themselves into the proverbial “Red Zone” and, rather than stick to the plan and see it through, they self-sabotage by abandoning the fundamentals and trying something new. Neglect also compounds. If we neglect our existing relationships it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be lured away and we’ll have to throw our own Hail Mary. Don’t deviate from your process. Identify the most fundamentally sound and proven trust-building activities, stick with them and tune out all the other noise. It’s much more effective to strengthen and nurture existing relationships over the long haul, rather than perpetually trying to start new ones. The prospecting treadmill is draining and you are building a business that is chaotic and unfocused. Relationships are proprietary and are a big part of the equity that you are building in your business.

It is often relatively easy to find companies that are being disrupted and will eventually disappear, but they are not always easy to short and make money. The flawed business model company may have potential acquirers, they may have new management teams excite investors for a turnaround, or they may negotiate desperate partnerships to keep the company alive. All these things can make the stock price spike from very low valuation levels and cause material losses.

Quoting page 150-151: Political camouflage, needed by legislators eager to please civil rights and minority organizations while avoiding punishment by voters for supporting racial quotas, was provided by the bureaucratic obscurity of the government’s procurement process. Voters did not understand the complexities of government contracting and agency regulation. … The weaknesses of minority set-asides were chiefly two. First, they were indubitably racial and ethnic quotas, and hence were politically controversial. As government benefits tied to ancestry, they violated the classic liberal creed that Americans possessed equal individual rights. … Nonminority contractors were barred by their ancestry or their skin color from even bidding on contracts paid for by taxpayer dollars, including their own. Second, and less obviously, set-aside programs produced a common set of flaws in implementation. The most severe problem was the concentration of set-aside contracts on a few successful firms. Agency officials, needing to spend a large amount of money on minority procurement contractors every fiscal year, found very few minority contractors able to do the job. Four-fifths of all certified minority firms had no employees, their personnel roster consisting solely of the owner of the enterprise. As a consequence, agency set-aside contracts were typically concentrated on only a few firms large enough and sufficiently experienced to meet the terms of the contracts, providing constructing, street paving, computer services, military uniforms, or other goods and services. In 1990, for example, only fifty firms, representing less than 2 percent of the certified minority firms in the 8(a) program, accounted for 40 percent of the $4 billion awarded. … such firms never seemed to “graduate” from the set-aside program, weaned from the incubator and ready to compete in the normal marketplace of competitive government contracting. … Almost all the contracts were awarded on a no-bid or “sole source” basis; in fiscal 1991, for example, only 1.9 percent of the 4,576 contracts in the 8(a) program were awarded on a competitive basis.

Consider the experience of buying a stereo system, as conveyed by Shane Frederick, Nathan Novemsky, Jing Wang, Ravi Dhar, and Stephen Nowlis in an aptly named paper, “Opportunity Cost Neglect.” In their experiment, one group of participants was asked to decide between a $1,000 Pioneer and a $700 Sony. A second group was asked to pick between the $1,000 Pioneer and a package deal where for $1,000 they could get the Sony plus $300 to be spent only on CDs. In reality both groups were choosing between different ways of spending that $1,000. The first group chose between spending all of it on a Pioneer or spending $700 on a Sony and $300 on other things. The second group chose between spending all of it on a Pioneer or spending $700 on a Sony and $300 on music. The results showed that the Sony stereo was a much more popular choice when it was accompanied by $300 of CDs than when it was sold without them. Why is this odd? Well, strictly speaking, an unconstrained $300 is worth more than $300 that must be spent on CDs because we can buy anything with the unconstrained money—including CDs. But when the $300 was framed as being dedicated to CDs, the participants found it more appealing. That’s because $300 worth of CDs is much more concrete and defined than just $300 of “anything.” In the $300-for-CD case we know what we’re getting. It is tangible and easy to evaluate. When the $300 is abstract and general, we don’t conjure up the specific images of how we’re going to spend it, and the emotional, motivational forces on us are less powerful. This is just one more example of how when we represent money in a general way, we end up undervaluing it compared to when we have a specific representation of that money.1 Yes, CDs are the example here, which nowadays is like thinking about the gas efficiency of a stegosaurus, but the point remains: People are somewhat surprised when we simply remind them that there are alternative ways to spend money, whether it’s on a vacation or on a pile of CDs. That surprise suggests that people don’t tend to naturally consider alternatives, and without considering alternatives, we can’t possibly take opportunity costs into account. This tendency for neglecting opportunity costs shows us the basic flaw in our thinking.

He told me that it would have been possible to have a father and have a child to look at the flaws of time, but in this time and with your money you can get the highest certificates in the highest specialties only. The price is poor. A doctor caused my wife's uterus to explode and the fetus died. The world is lonely. And this library is my dwelling place and my work spend day and night at work and night if it honors sleepiness and guest guest on it if not come and live with my memories and my pain. If you become concerned with the affairs of the public and the people, what you have to do is to show faith in the Creator, because what you hear your ear enters your heart and makes it cold. It is possible to cool a word when you reveal what is inside it and leave you and your scars in your chewing. قايتباي

Mook knew that Hillary viewed almost every early decision through a 2008 lens: she thought almost everything her own campaign had done was flawed and almost everything Obama’s had done was pristine. Hillary felt that profligate spending was one major cause of her undoing. The money needs to be tightly managed, Mook thought. And, having spoken to her over the course of months, he’d acquired a sense of the direction she wanted to go in. Hillary thought she needed a more professional staff and cleaner lines of authority than she’d had in 2008. That, in theory, would reduce the infighting that had plagued her first bid.

There happens to be a coffee bar in the lobby of the hotel. One afternoon while on a business trip in Las Vegas, I went to buy myself a cup of coffee. The barista working that day was a young man named Noah. Noah was funny and engaging. It was because of Noah that I enjoyed buying that cup of coffee more than I generally enjoy buying a cup of coffee. After standing and chatting for a while, I finally asked him, “Do you like your job?” Without skipping a beat Noah immediately replied, “I love my job!” Now, for someone in my line of business, that’s a significant response. He didn’t say, “I like my job,” he said, “I love my job.” That’s a big difference. “Like” is rational. We like the people we work with. We like the challenge. We like the work. But “love,” love is emotional. Love is something harder to quantify. It’s like asking someone “Do you love your spouse,” and they respond, “I like my spouse a lot.” It’s a very different answer. You get my point, love is a higher standard. So when Noah said, “I love my job,” I perked up. From that one response, I knew Noah felt an emotional connection to the Four Seasons that was bigger than the money he made and the job he performs. Immediately, I asked Noah a follow-up question. “Tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me that you love your job.” Again without skipping a beat, Noah replied, “Throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I’m doing, ask me if there is anything I need, anything they can do to help. Not just my manager … any manager. I also work for [another hotel],” he continued. He went on to explain that at his other job the managers walk past and try to catch people doing things wrong. At the other hotel, Noah lamented, “I keep my head below the radar. I just want to get through the day and get my paycheck. Only at the Four Seasons,” Noah said, “do I feel I can be myself.” Noah gives his best when he’s at the Four Seasons. Which is what every leader wants from their people. So it makes sense why so many leaders, even some of the best-intentioned ones, often ask, “How do I get the most out of my people?” This is a flawed question, however. It’s not a question about how to help our people grow stronger, it’s about extracting more output from them. People are not like wet towels to be wrung out. They are not objects from which we can squeeze every last drop of performance. The answers to such a question might yield more output for a time, but it often comes at a cost of our people and to the culture in the longer term. Such an approach will never generate the feelings of love and commitment that Noah has for the Four Seasons. A better question to ask is, “How do I create an environment in which my people can work to their natural best?

Guilt can be helpful. It can move us to make a better decision next time. But shame is debilitating. Bestselling author Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed, and therefore, unworthy of love and belonging.”12 In The Lion King, Simba ran away from his life because he thought he was a failure. He thought he was unworthy. Remember what happened just before Simba faced his past? Don’t miss this: Simba gets a message from his father reminding him who he is. The order here is everything. Simba had to remember who he really was in order to take on his past mistakes and move forward.

when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience. I

Labeling the biological and/or emotional urges of a human baby as Narcissistic is despicable and flawed reasoning -yet expected- coming from Dennis Prager, the Jew. The child as being 'preoccupied with her-/himself' and being a factor in 'ruining life' are the kind of signals this rotten soul perceives taking into consideration that it also asserts -based on conviction and pedagogical endeavors which it preaches to its audience- that [money is not worshipable, while nature is]. This Jew even concluded with its demonic inspiration that the human baby is intrinsically 'not good' based on its wicked and disturbed observation that babies cannot even articulate gratitude in return! It (this Jew Rotten Soul) summed up the seminar by linking man (based on this so-called evidence) to evil and by pointing out the necessity for taking action and controlling such behavior. No wonder The Lord ever cursed the Jews and banished them to the fringes of all other nations; to punish them on Earth for their persistent Polytheism and civilized Child Sacrifice using such a theological mischief.

Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience. I

I'm saying the structure and f the entire culture is flawed, chip said. I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental health is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian, modernity right this instant.

The church is designed to be an intentional presence (but not the only location) of true God-Love in the world. What is needed is a renewed vision of the Christian church that has moved beyond propagating “right” belief and doctrine, that has moved beyond building up successful institutions, and has moved beyond defining the Christian life as whatever behavior will please God in order to get good things, like a care-free life, good health, success, respect, money, or heaven. We need to dispense with the flawed image in which everybody should be alike, just like “us,” and believe the same thing theologically, culturally, philosophically, and every other way—embrace the same ideas, vote the same way, live the same way, and think the same way. The Love that is the presence of God, and that is the main component of the church, is for all kinds of persons, all kinds of backgrounds, colors, sizes, shapes, and DNA, and excludes no one.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” Most

them out if they make dumb choices. Let them struggle; let them learn; let them take responsibility. They need to figure out the importance of working hard, saving money, being smart. For God’s sake, don’t be a damned fool and then go begging the government to save you.” This is not a stupid argument. I come at the issues differently, of course, as someone who supports a strong social safety net. But this more conservative view represents a considered and consistent position, worthy of respect. Lower-income conservatives are making the same kind of argument that rich liberals are making. They are willing to make monetary sacrifices to answer the call of their fundamental values. For liberals, those values are more about the common good and enlightened self-interest. For conservatives, those values are more about the importance of independence and personal responsibility. But both sides rightfully see their voting behavior as needing to reflect more than just a vulgar calculation about their immediate pocketbook needs. If one side deserves respect, then so does the other.*1 Of course, respecting our opponent’s argument doesn’t mean we have to just accept it and give in. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t argue passionately about the best approach to taxes or spending—especially in a society as complex as ours, with the stakes as high as they are. In fact, we should disagree and debate. Debate is the lifeblood of democracy, after all. Disagreement is a good thing—even heated disagreement. Only in a dictatorship does everybody have to agree. In a democracy, nobody has to agree. That’s called freedom. It’s the whole point of America. But at the base of too many of our public discussions sits the same destructive assumption: I’m right. And you’re wrong. We proceed on both sides as if our side is grounded in “the Truth” and the other side is always insane and delusional. And some version of this flawed concept has become the default setting throughout American political discourse. It is one thing to say, “I disagree with you because we have different values and priorities.” It’s quite another to say, “I disagree with you because you are an uneducated idiot—a pawn—and a dupe.” The prevalence of the latter set of arguments is why the Democratic Party stinks of elitism. Here’s another liberal favorite: “How can we argue with conservatives? They don’t believe in facts anymore—only ‘alternative facts.’ At least, liberals believe in science. Right-wingers don’t!” I understand the source of liberal exasperation here. Even though any high school student can reproduce the greenhouse-gas effect in a laboratory beaker,

The bad news is your flaws don’t come from nowhere. The world is deeply fucked from every angle; its damage is incomprehensibly vast and ancient, hooked into the future and printed upon you in endless, innumerable ways. You can’t reverse it. But art can unmake you differently. A perfect pop song, the kind that knees you in the chest while you’re standing in a checkout line, is the sound of something familiar resolving into something transcendent. A good poem finds the cracks in the foundations of your thinking and outlines them with glitter, or sets the whole building on fire. People make things with money they get from the government, or from jobs, or from stealing, and one time out of every 500 that you go to see those things they’ve made, some small corner of your world will come unlaced because of it. That’s not a lot, but it’s proof that the work of living can be more than just gesture: that there is more to do with structure than to surrender or be crushed by it. You can always be made a little more unsure; you can always be taken a little more apart.

A major flaw in this defective system is that no LSAT score is too low to be admitted. These dipshit law schools will take anybody who can borrow the federal money, and, as stated, anybody can borrow the federal money.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.12 Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed, whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known. One of the most important roles of senior management during a venture’s early years is to learn from emergent sources what is working and what is not, and then to cycle that learning back into the process through the deliberate channel.

Government scientists were sidelined, and partisanship swamped sense. Team Blue hates Team Red because they are putting grandparents in danger by not wearing masks. Team Red hates Team Blue because they are infringing on liberty and threatening the economy over something that hasn’t impacted anyone they know. Then, once the virus overwhelmed us, we concocted a flawed economic bailout program. Red-state governors and blue university chancellors opted for politics and money over the health of the country and reopened prematurely.

I’m sweaty. I’m tired. And I stink in places I really shouldn’t be stinking.” I whine and shoot a glare to Dean, who’s sitting in the passenger seat looking sheepish. “What?” he exclaims with his hands raised. “I didn’t know we’d have fucking car trouble. Your car isn’t even a year old.” “I know!” I snap, hitting my hand on the wheel and growling in frustration. “Stupid old lady car!” I exclaim and push my head closer to the window for a breeze. “The frickin’ air conditioning isn’t even working anymore. Me and this car are officially in a fight.” “I think we all just need to remain calm,” Lynsey chirps from the back seat, leaning forward so her head comes between Dean’s and mine. “Because, as horrible as this trip was, after everything that’s happened between the three of us the past couple of years, I think this was really healing.” I close my eyes and shake my head, ruing the moment I agreed that a road trip to the Rocky Mountains to pick up this four-thousand-dollar carburetor from some hick who apparently didn’t know how to ‘mail things so they don’t get lost.’” Honestly! How are people who don’t use the mail a thing? Though, admittedly, when we got to the man’s mountain home, I realized that he was probably more familiar with the Pony Express. And I couldn’t be sure his wife wasn’t his cousin. But that’s me being judgmental. Still, though, it’s no wonder he wouldn’t let me PayPal him the money. I had to get an actual cashier’s check from a real bank. Then on our way back down the mountain, I got a flat tire. Dean, Lynsey, and I set about changing it together, thinking three heads could figure out how to put a spare tire on better than one. One minute, I’m snapping at Dean to hand me the tire iron, and the next minute, he’s asking me if I’m being a bitch because he told me he had feelings for me. Then Lynsey chimes in, hurt and dismayed that neither of us told her about our conversation at the bakery, and it was a mess. On top of all of that, my car wouldn’t start back up! It was a disaster. The three of us fighting with each other on the side of the road looked like a bad episode of Sister Wives: Colorado Edition. I should probably make more friends. “God, I hope this thing is legit,” Dean states, turning the carburetor over in his hands. “Put it down. You’re making me nervous,” I snap, eyeing him cautiously. We’re only five miles from Tire Depot, and they close in ten, so my nerves are freaking fried. “I just want to drop this thing off and forget this whole trip ever happened.” “No!” Lynsey exclaims. “Stick to the plan. This is your grand gesture! Your get out of jail free card.” “I don’t want a get out of jail free card,” I cry back. “The longer we spent on that hot highway trying to figure out what was wrong with my car, the more ridiculous this plan became in my head. I don’t want to buy Miles’s affection back. I want him to want me for me. Flaws and all.” “So what are you going to do?” Dean asks, and I feel his concerned eyes on mine. “I’m going to drop this expensive hunk of metal at the counter and leave. I’m not giving it to him naked or holding the thing above my head like John Cusack in Say Anything. I’ll drop it off at the front counter, and then we’ll go. End of story.” Lynsey’s voice pipes up from behind. “That sounds like the worst ending to a book I’ve ever heard.” “This isn’t a book!” I shriek. “This is my life, and it’s no wonder this plan has turned into such a mess. It has desperation stamped all over it. I just want to go home, eat some pizza, and cry a little, okay?” The car is dead silent as we enter Boulder until Dean’s voice pipes up. “Hey Kate, I know you’re a little emongry right now, but I really don’t think you should drive on this spare tire anymore. They’re only manufactured to drive for so many miles, you know.” I turn and glower over at him. He shrinks down into his seat a little bit.

What was difficult was finding an honest, dedicated man with a clear brain to watch over everything and find the flaws by thinking through all the problems before going ahead. As they had taught him at Oxford, the vital link in the chain of business was management. Without good management all the workers in the world would be going round in circles with no one in the end making any money, the investment coming to nothing, everyone out of a job.

Owns Up to Mistakes “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” —Thomas Carlyle If there is one hallmark of maturity that is universally agreed upon, it is personal responsibility — the ability to recognize when one has made a mistake and to own up to it. And to do so quickly, forthrightly, and without excuse. The reason it’s hard to admit to messing up is that it depreciates your self-concept — your vision of yourself as really being a great guy. So to protect the ego, you come up with justifications — which feel like rational explanations rather than lies — for why you had to do what you did. You blame your mood or the unique circumstances. You say someone “made” you do it — that you were provoked. You engage in “if-only” reasoning: “If only you didn’t push my buttons, I wouldn’t lose my temper”; “If only this job paid better, I wouldn’t have to skim extra money off the top.” It’s easier to fess up to mistakes when the gap between these lapses and our self-concept has been shrunken — by humility. We still think well of ourselves, but also realize we’re a little flawed, a little broken, and imperfectly human. We use this recognition not to justify our misbehavior but as a way to more readily recognize our shortcomings, apologize for them, and get to work on their improvement. In the mode of mature personal responsibility there are no apologies with caveats, no “Sorry, but’s . . .” Just the frank ownership of error. Yet there is no room for excess self-flagellation, either. The mature individual recognizes the mistake, confesses it, and offers restitution if possible/necessary. Then, he moves on and tries to be better in the future. He neither ignores his mistakes, nor allows them to push him into a place of demoralizing regret and rumination. He sees them as important learning experiences. As put by the authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), mature individuals “see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.

A RADICAL IDEA Take a close-up look at how guilt operates in conjunction with the Upper Limit Problem. It shows up when we’re feeling good (or making extra money or feeling a deeper loving connection in a relationship). When we’re feeling good, we may come up against the hidden barrier of an old belief such as “I must not feel good, because fundamentally flawed people like me don’t deserve it.

Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.

The old story where the central plot is money and power define success, is fundamentally flawed. History has repeatedly proven that this story doesn’t work. It causes pain, suffering and fear; it destroys life and our planet; and it dampens the human spirit. In this narrative, those oppressed by the money-power society inevitably rebel, take over, and sadly repeat the same destructive cycle.

The concept of selling solutions isn’t wrong. It’s based on a valid recognition of the enormous unmet needs most customers have. But very few companies have figured out how to implement the concept profitably. Most failed attempts to deliver solutions have suffered from one of two common flaws. First, many are uncompelling or undifferentiated in the customer’s eyes. Sometimes the word solution is simply code for a consultative selling process or an attempt to pitch some kind of service agreement along with the product. Sometimes the solution is more significant, but undifferentiated. Take outsourcing as an example. Many companies have moved to take over and run some customer function, such as the mail room or call center, and then struggled to make money. The reason: In most cases, this is simply a cost-of-capital or -labor play, based on the notion that the contractor can run the operation more cheaply than the client firm. The function’s role in enhancing the customer’s business scarcely changes. Not surprisingly, this purely cost-based value proposition leads to rapid downward pricing pressure and service commoditization. The other major problem with many attempts to create solutions is their complexity. Once a company has developed a compelling solutions offering, reaching and serving the customer often requires the creation of a highly skilled delivery force that is hard to scale up. The result is a small, marginally profitable operation that clings to relevance on the periphery of the business.

He: You know why I have put your name in my dictionary? I don't care about your dreams, your self respect, your passion. What I care is MY MIND. I'm self motivated man. When I'll crush your self confidence, you will not able to see in my eyes in proud. This is a leadership. I'm a king & you're just a poor woman with so many flaws. I'll control your social media & show you how much powerful I'm. I've power, money, people & family. She: All the best for your vision! You'll be successful one day!

It is not that brave to say you love your body only after you’ve contorted it to precisely what you want it to look like. It is not that brave to say you don’t care about possessions when you have access to everything in the world. It is not that brave to say you aren’t motivated by money when you have enough of it. When you only find happiness and peace after you’ve fixed every flaw, mastered every challenge, and are living decidedly in the “after” part of the picture of your life, you have not resolved anything. You have only reinforced the idea that you cannot be okay until everything is perfect.

But we also live in an age of manufactured distrust. Partisan news sources amplify and exaggerate the failures of the other side—even as they ignore, minimize, and rationalize their own obvious flaws. There is much money to be made and much fame to be gained by telling partisans exactly what they want to hear and inoculating them against external critique.

Bunch of Quotes … Legend: #/ = page number 12/ Money as Archetype. The key point is that money must have power over us inwardly in order to have power in the world. We must believe in its value before we will change our conduct based on whether or not we will receive it. In the broadest sense, money becomes a vehicle of relationship. It enables us to make choices and cooperate with one another, it singlas what we will do with our energy. 16/ The Latin word moneta derives from the Indo-European root men-, which means to use one’s mind or think. The goddess Moneta is modeled on the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Contained in the power to remember is the ability to warn, so Moneta is also considered to be a goddess who can give warnings. To suggest money can affect us in different ways we might remember that the Greek words menos (which means spirit, courage, purpose) and mania (which means madness) come from the same root as memory and Moneta. Measurement, from the Indo-European root me-, also relates to mental abilities and is a crucial aspect of money. 95/ [Crawford relates the experience of a friend], a mother, whose only son suffered from drug addiction. … At last she overcame her motherly instincts and refused him a place to stay and food and money. [She gave him a resources list for dealing with addiction.] 98/ Even an addition, according to psychologist C.G. Jung, a form of spiritual craving. Jung expressed this viewpoint in correspondence with Bill Wilson (Bill W), the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. 107/ The inner search is not a denial of our outer needs, but rather in part a way of learning the right attitudes and actions with which to deal with the outer world—including money and ownership. 114/ Maimonodes, Golden Ladder of Charity. [this list is from charitywatch.org] Maimonides, a 12th century Jewish scholar, invented the following ladder of giving. Each rung up represents a higher degree of virtue: 1. The lowest: Giving begrudgingly and making the recipient feel disgraced or embarrassed. 2. Giving cheerfully but giving too little. 3. Giving cheerfully and adequately but only after being asked. 4. Giving before being asked. 5. Giving when you do not know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient knows your identity. 6. Giving when you know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient does not know your identity. 7. Giving when neither the donor nor the recipient is aware of the other's identity. 8. The Highest: Giving money, a loan, your time or whatever else it takes to enable an individual to be self-reliant. 129/ Remember as this myth unfolds [Persephone] that we are speaking of inheritance in the larger sense. What we inherit is not merely money and only received at death, but it is everything, both good and bad, that we receive from our parents throughout our lifetime. When we examine such an inheritance, some of what we receive will be truly ours and worthwhile to keep. The rest we must learn to surrender if we are to get on with our own lives. 133/ As so happens, the child must deal with what the parent refuses to confront. 146/ Whether the parent is alive or dead, the child may believe some flaw in the parent has crippled and limited the child’s life. To become attached to this point of view is damaging, because the child fails to take responsibility for his or her own destiny.

Everything that makes the neck longer is attractive. Extravagance kills the personality. All the superlatives are devalued. Beauty treatments should begin with the heart and the soul, otherwise cosmetics are pointless. The interior of the home is the natural projection of the soul and Balzac was right to attach as much importance to it as he did to clothing. You don't need enthusiasm in order to earn money, you need it in order to spend it. Wealth is not accumulation, it's the exact opposite, it serves to free us, it's the "I've had everything and that everything is nothing." Just as in fashion, you generally begin with something that is too beautiful in order to attain simplicity. I have a hatred of hanging on to things. Almost all our emotional, social and moral troubles stem from the fact that we don't know how to give anything up. Money adds to the decorative pleasures of life but it's not life. Women conceal their defects instead of considering them as yet another asset. You have to know how to take advantage of your flaws and apply them with cunning; if you know how to make use of them, you obtain everything. I have decided to be happy without requiring that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness.

That was when I began to learn how to do all the things I had been taught not to do. I learned over the years to accept more and more of myself,. The doctor and theologian Gerald May said self-acceptance is freedom. I learned to waste a lot more time, which is the opposite of the fourth thing you're told after you're born: Don't waste time. (It comes right after Go clean your room.) The fifth rule is Don't waste paper, but in order to become who I was meant to be, I learned I had to waste more paper, to practice messes, false starts and blunders: these are necessary stops on the route of creativity and emotional growth. To make up for all my papery mistakes, I sent money to the Sierra Club. I had to accept that contrary to my parents' terror of looking bad, almost everybody worth his or her salt was a mess and had been an overly sensitive child. Almost everyone had at one time or another been exposed to the world as being flawed, and human. And that it was good, for the development of character and empathy, for the growth of the spirit. Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.

More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself. This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities. Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs. Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.

This is the intrinsic flaw, the infuriating circular logic. We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of a basic human right.

As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold. “Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love. “Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant; not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment; that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

Now, picture a bank that’s financing CDOs for a hedge fund through Repo transactions. Suppose the floor dropped-out from under the CDO market, like it did in 2007, and the bank issued a margin call to the hedge fund. Suppose the hedge fund told the bank, “We will give you your cash as soon as we sell some CDOs. Maybe next week.” That doesn’t work. But the Repo counterparty has an out. No need to wait. Once there is technically a default or bankruptcy, the bank can take over the hedge fund’s positions and liquidate them. Then they cross their fingers that they had taken enough margin to cover the losses on the forced sale! That brings up a good question. Why are there runs on banks and shadow banks? The question is easily answered when you look at what banks and shadow banks have in common. They lend long and borrow short. It’s the age-old business model flaw of the banking system. They are lending money long-term and borrowing money short-term. A bank writes a 30-year mortgage loan to a homeowner and borrows money from their depositors to cover the loan. Remember, the depositors can show up any day and withdraw their money. Unfortunately, this same bank business model flaw extends to the shadow banks. They also lend long and borrow short. Just like a bank, a REIT’s MBS portfolio might have an average weighted maturity of, say, seven years.

It’s still not fair! Nobody ever does anything to these tenants. It’s always the landlord. This system is flawed….But whatever. I’ll never see the money. These people are deadbeats.

John Law’s System wasn’t inherently flawed; John Law was inherently flawed. He failed because he wanted too much power—and when he got it, the power structure in France meant there was no one to push back, no way to create that necessary balance.

If you do enough threat modeling, you start noticing all kinds of instances where people get the threat profoundly wrong: * The cell phone industry spent a lot of money designing their systems to detect fraud, but they misunderstood the threat. They thought the criminals would steal cell phone service to avoid paying the charge. Actually, what the criminals wanted was anonymity; they didn't want cell phone calls traced back to them. Cell phone identities are stolen off the air, used a few times, and then thrown away. The antifraud system wasn't designed to catch this kind of fraud. * The same cell phone industry, back in the analog days, didn't bother securing the connection because (as they said): 'scanners are expensive, and rare.' Over the years, scanners became cheap and plentiful. Then, in a remarkable display of not getting it, the same industry didn't bother securing digital cell phone connections because 'digital scanners are expensive, and rare.' Guess what? They're getting cheaper, and more plentiful. * Hackers often trade hacking tools on Web sites and bulletin boards. Some of those hacking tools are themselves infected with Back Orifice, giving the tool writer access to the hacker's computer. Aristotle called this kind of thing 'poetic justice.' [...] These attacks are interesting not because of flaws in the countermeasures, but because of flaws in the threat model. In all of these cases, there were countermeasures in place; they just didn't solve the correct problem. Instead, they solved some problem near the correct problem. And in some cases, the solutions created worse problems than they solved.

Another similar story is the recent Theranos scandal, where the company’s CEO, Elizabeth Holmes (at the time of writing, on trial for wire fraud), managed to bilk unbelievable amounts of money from investors such as Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family (of Walmart fame), and many more, becoming America’s youngest and richest self-made female billionaire. Her company’s devices, which ostensibly could diagnose many health conditions from a tiny drop of blood, never actually worked. But the investors, who wanted to get in at the start of what might’ve been the next Facebook or Uber in terms of its transformative technological effect, managed to miss or ignore the obvious flaws. The story is told by the investigative journalist John Carreyrou in his unputdownable Bad Blood, John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

While the discussions focus on how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies can transform many industries. The cryptocurrency community is witnessing several hackers steal millions from blockchains, exchanges, and bridges. From the 2014 MT GOX hack to the recent Nomad Bridge attack, hackers are advancing along with the growth of blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency industry. Several million-dollar attacks have occurred, and hackers are becoming more ambitious and dangerous. In the past few days, Attacks have escalated, as well as the amount of funds stolen has increased too. Many individuals are in a panic as they have lost their savings, The attacks on the Solana wallets, Nomad bridge, and ZB exchange brought another riskier prospect of cryptocurrencies. There are many doubts surrounding the security of cryptocurrencies: how can these bridges be easy targets for hackers? how hackers can easily access other crypto wallets? Let's get into the detail of these three different types of attacks and how hackers make millions through them. Bridge attacks Blockchain bridges are applications that allow people to transfer digital assets between blockchains. Since cryptocurrencies are often isolated and unable to communicate with one another (for example, you cannot make a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain using Dogecoins), "bridges" have emerged as an essential mechanism, if not a vital missing link, in the cryptocurrency economy. The bridge "locks" your cash on one side and dispenses the equal amount in so-called "wrapped" tokens on the other. To change one form of cryptocurrency into another, bridge services "wrap" the money. As a result, if you visit a bridge to use a different currency, such as Bitcoin (BTC), the bridge will dispense wrapped bitcoins (WBTC). It represents stored value in a flexible alternate format, similar to a gift card or a cheque. Bridges require a reserve of cryptocurrency currencies to back all of those wrapped coins, and hackers frequently target this reserve. Additionally, if a bridge becomes popular over time, it can have a lot of money (imagine hundreds of millions of dollars) tied up in its smart contracts. If those smart contracts contain security flaws, some or all of that money can be stolen. As former Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has pointed out, another issue with crypto bridges is that they are by design vulnerable to attacks on two sides. Nomad attack On July 29, Nomad, a bridge protocol for moving cryptocurrencies across multiple blockchains, lost about $200 million due to a security flaw. In the case of Nomad, it appears that a fault in its smart contract allowed someone to set up a cryptocurrency transaction such that they sent a few amounts of crypto on one side, but received a larger amount on the other, as multiple experts stated on Twitter. For example, you could transfer 0.1 Crypto on one side and receive 100 Crypto on the other. Things start to become intriguing at this point. Usually, when a security flaw like this is discovered, a skilled hacker or a small group can quickly drain out all the money. However, in the case of Nomad, once someone successfully stole some cash from the Nomad bridge, other people joined in and also grabbed some money. This is not the only bridge that has been compromised this year. The Ronin Bridge, which was used by the developers of the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, was hacked earlier this year for approximately $625 million. The Harmony Bridge was also hacked for $100 million. Wallet Hacks

The concept of retirement is flawed and it’s hurting people.

to illustrate the flaw in believing that money will solve all problems.

There are quiet places also in the mind,' he said, meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately - to put a stop to the quietness. We don't like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head - round and round, continually.' He made a circular motion with his hand. 'And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What's it for, what's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost is isn't there. Ah, but is is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes - not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep - the quiet reestablishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows - a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one's alone in the crystal and there 's no support from outside, there's nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There's nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can't face the advancing thing. One daren't. It's too terrifying, it's too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow the saxophone. Think of the women you'dl like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the first flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you'd do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you'll never commit.' He thought of Rosie's pink underwear.

Soros (2013) notes that the euro crisis has already transformed the EU from a free association of states enjoying equal rights to a more or less enduring relationship between debtors and creditors. The creditors risk losing a good deal of money if a member states leaves the union, while the debtors are forced to accept conditions which can only aggravate their economic depression, and place them in a subordinate position for an indefinite period of time. In this way the euro crisis threatens to destroy the EU itself. According to the American financier these are the consequences of the fatal flaw of the European monetary union: in creating the ECB as a fully independent central bank the member states indebted themselves in a currency which they cannot control. As a consequence, when the risk of a Greek default became concrete, the financial markets reacted by reducing the status of all heavily indebted members of the euro zone to that of developing countries with large debts in foreign currencies. In this way, these members of the euro zone were treated as if they alone were responsible for their present condition. The correct response to this situation, Soros concludes, would be the creation of Eurobonds and a banking union, together with the necessary structural reforms. However, Germany refuses to choose between the two alternatives: either accept the Eurobonds or leave the euro zone. On the other hand, a solution of the crisis would also require a level of centralization of the economic and fiscal policies of the member states that is, most likely, politically unfeasible. Thus the end of monetary union appears to be only a question of time, while the position of the major German parties – pro monetary union but against Eurobonds – is clearly contradictory.

When I look back and carefully examine each of these failures, the fatal flaw always comes down to one of two things: Making money was more important to me than serving people. I rushed into it.