Incoming Storm Quotes

Home for me is not where I am. Home for me is a physical structure where the girl whom I love is sheltered and protected from the incoming storms of life. Home for me is not where I am safe, but where she is safe. Home for me is not where she exists, but where she lives. She is my home.

It had not seemed difficult, on a small income, to know what was right to do....Now, with so much, it was daily a decision: what was necessary, what was frivolous...It was so much gray--so little black and white; for a year she'd spent more of her time questioning herself and how she lived in Truth than she had done altogether in her life.

[Those] on fixed incomes are the nation's math elite.

I’m like a sailor, born and bred in the deck of a privateer. Storm and battle are a part of his life, and if he’s cast ashore he pines in boredom, indifferent to the pleasures of shady woods and peaceful sunshine. All day long he walks the beach listening to the steady murmur of the incoming waves and gazing for the sight of a ship in the distant haze. He looks longingly at the pale strip between the ocean blue and the grey clouds, in hopes of seeing a sail, first like a seagull’s wing, that then gradually stands out against the foaming breakers and runs in steadily towards the desolate haven.

I hold no lands, that is true. But I have certain incomes, and chests of coin set aside. My own father forgot none of his children when he died, and Tywin knew how to reward good service. I feed two hundred knights and can double that number if need be. There are freeriders who will follow my banner, and I have the gold to hire sellswords.

Technocrats live their lives abstractly, even while they are managing their own sphere. For them, all problems are intellectual. You must think constantly, and that thinking makes action possible. Once you have thought, the doing simply follows. Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world. The tension of the technocracy is between their work in their own fields and the universal principles that they practice. This shows itself most clearly in the way they deal with the declining class, the heavily white, industrial working class. In the thinking of the technocracy, the fundamental cause of oppression is whites who have historically oppressed using race, nationality, and gender. But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it. This declining class is plunging economically, but for the technocracy, which embraces a vast range of incomes, that decline is not of the essence. It is their unwillingness to abandon oppression.

Then comes the next way cultural values are transmitted to kids, namely by peers. This was emphasized in Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption. Harris, a psychologist without an academic affiliation or doctorate, took the field by storm, arguing that the importance of parenting in shaping a child’s adult personality is exaggerated.51 Instead, once kids pass a surprisingly young age, peers are most influential. Elements of her argument included: (a) Parental influence is often actually mediated via peers. For example, being raised by a single mother increases the risk of adult antisocial behavior, but not because of the parenting; instead, because of typically lower income, kids more likely live in a neighborhood with tough peers. (b) Peers have impact on linguistic development (e.g., children acquire the accent of their peers, not their parents). (c) Other young primates are mostly socialized by peers, not mothers.

Things change, not only in one’s life but also in the economy and on the political scene, and it pays to be aware. Is the foundation of your financial house secure, with an income that is guaranteed? Have you built solid walls, investing appropriately, and keeping inflation at bay? Are you living under a reliable roof, with assets positioned to grow? Is your house insulated and sturdy, safe from any economic storm?

Stop the Flow of Money It doesn’t matter whether we are on a fixed income or are blessed with abundant financial resources, a common denominator among enablers is the flow of money to our adult children. It doesn’t matter whether it’s $20 or $20,000, we must stop coming to the rescue with our checkbooks. Our money must cease being the life preservers that buoy up our adult children, keeping them afloat through yet another storm. We might be amazed at just how well our adult children can swim when given the opportunity to do so. More important, they just might be surprised at their own ability to survive without life support, a powerful lesson that no amount of money can purchase.

Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special. And Uber did this because a few years earlier they’d watched Twitter take SXSW by storm with a similar collaboration with the conference. This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.

Material wellbeing, and measures of it—GDP, personal income, and consumption—have recently received a bad press. Spending more, we are often told, does not bring us better lives, and religious authorities regularly warn against materialism. Even among those of us who endorse economic growth, there are many critics of GDP as it is currently defined and measured. GDP excludes important activities, such as services by homemakers; it takes no account of leisure; and it often does a poor job of measuring those things that are included. It also includes things that arguably should be excluded, like the cost of cleaning up pollution or building prisons or commuting. These “defensive” expenditures are not good in and of themselves but are regrettably necessary to enable things that are good.4 If crime goes up, and we spend more on prisons, GDP will be higher. If we neglect climate change, and spend more and more on cleaning up and repairing after storms, GDP will go up, not down; we count the repairs but ignore the destruction.

me. “Well, I know one thing about my twins. They’re not going to be models. I already tried them out for catalogue work. Within the first ten minutes, Orianthe informed me that she doesn’t like to do boring things and that modelling’s boring. And she’s not going to let her brother do boring things either.” I laughed. The cries of the twins pealed down the hallway as they bounded inside and called Jessie’s name. They must have discovered she was home. “Hey, where’s the pup?” I asked Pria. “Can I see him? Jessie said he’s growing big.” Immediately, Pria rolled her eyes and made a low disparaging sound. “I sent Buster out with the dog walker as soon as I knew Kate was coming over with the kids. He’d knock them flying. Wish I’d never bought him, to tell you the truth. After the break-in, I wanted a watchdog, but I should have paid more attention to the breed. He’s damned strong—even though he’s only nine months old. And he snaps. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit scared of the mutt. I’m having a dog trainer try to rein him in, but if that doesn’t work, he’s gone.” “What a shame,” I said. “Jess told me she’d like to walk the dog sometimes, but that’s not sounding good.” “Nope. The only thing I got right about him is his name. Because Buster has busted everything from doors to shoes.” She shook her head, a sorry smile on her face. The sound of the three children playing became too much. Tommy had once run through this house, too. I stayed for a while longer then made an excuse to leave.     29.                 PHOEBE   Tuesday night   STORM CLOUDS PUSHED INTO THE SKY, making the day darken a good hour before the incoming night. The heavy atmosphere pressed down on me. I opened the window of my bedroom upstairs at Nan’s house, letting the chill air stream in. I could only just catch a glimpse of the water from here. An enormous cruise liner dominated the harbour, staining the water red and blue with its lights. Maybe my small step in seeing Pria and Kate earlier had helped my frame of mind, but I didn’t feel it yet. I was back at square one. I began pacing the room, feeling unhinged. Things were all so in between. Dr Moran hadn’t succeeded in jogging my memory about the letters. She’d said she didn’t think it was possible to do all that I’d done in sleepwalking sessions and so the memory should still be in my mind somewhere. True sleepwalkers rarely remembered their dreams. Not remembering any of it was the most disturbing thing of all. It wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten things. With the binge drinking and the trauma of losing Tommy, there were gaps in my memory. But not a fucking chasm. And forgetting the writing of three notes and delivering them was a fucking chasm. Nan called me for dinner, and we ate the pumpkin soup together. I’d tried watching one of her sitcoms with her after that, but I gave up halfway through. I headed back upstairs. Surprisingly, I was tired enough to sleep. I crawled into bed and let myself drift off. I woke just before four thirty in the morning. The temperature had plummeted—I guessed it was below ten degrees. I’d been dreaming. The dream had been of the last day that Sass, Luke, Pria, Kate,

After a routine breakfast, I sat down to check my incoming emails. My heart missed several beats as I starred unflinchingly at an email from my long lost ex-lover, protector, Valet and trusted friend. Goosebumps formed on my shielded skin while my body went into involuntary concatenate convulsion. Terrified, I sat frozen for several minutes, not daring to read its contents. For no apparent reason, tears of joy and sorrow began forming in the corners of my eyes, throwing me into a state of utter confusion. Pulling away from the computer, I sat hypnotized on my veranda’s chaise lounge, desperately trying to calm myself from this recalcitrant ambivalence. Years of hurt and despair exploded to the vanguard, issues kept neatly and tidily locked in my recesses were ripped open by the invisible impending storm. The inception of my dream was simply too terrifying to perceive what was to happen next.

A well-organized revolt by the major members of its hard side can kill a product entirely. Twitter once bought an app called Vine for a reported $30 million. It let users create and view six-second looping video clips—it was ahead of its time, and not dissimilar from the insights behind TikTok. Like many social apps, the most popular content creators became very successful, and they were important to attract an audience. Unfortunately, a few years in, more than a dozen of the top content creators organized a revolt: Led by creators Marcus Johns and Piques, the group pitched an idea: If Vine paid each star $1.2 million and changed certain features of the app, each creator would post 12 Vines per month. Otherwise, all 18 would leave the platform. “We were driving billions of views—billions—before we left,” DeStorm Power explained of the monetary request.69 Vine turned down the plan, and a few years later, the service was shuttered. The hard side is worth the effort to cultivate. The most successful and prolific members of this side of the network also provide the highest level of service, are willing to make the investments to scale their impact, and ultimately become the defensible backbone of the network—assuming they can be retained. In Uber’s case, the power drivers represented the top 15 percent of drivers but constituted over 40 percent of our trips. They were also among the safest and most highly rated drivers—after all, it was their primary source of income.

Climatologists who use global computer models to simulate the long-term behavior of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans have known for several years that their models allow at least one dramatically different equilibrium. During the entire geological past, this alternative climate has never existed, but it could be an equally valid solution to the system of equations governing the earth. It is what some climatologists call the White Earth climate: an earth whose continents are covered by snow and whose oceans are covered by ice. A glaciated earth would reflect seventy percent of the incoming solar radiation and so would stay extremely cold. The lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, would be much thinner. The storms that would blow across the frozen surface would be much smaller than the storms we know. In general, the climate would be less hospitable to life as we know it. Computer models have such a strong tendency to fall into the White Earth equilibrium that climatologists find themselves wondering why it has never come about. It may simply be a matter of chance.

She tells me that many of her students are enduring sexual assault. One of her students was raped by her father every night. Yvonne was forced to call CPS to report him. The girl’s mother stormed into her office the day after he was arrested, screaming about how they didn’t have another source of income—the girl’s father was the sole breadwinner, and how would they survive now? Yvonne, helpless, could barely manage, “I don’t know…I don’t know…” until she burst into tears and she and the mother sat holding each other’s hands and sobbing.

We don’t all have the benefit of a private income,” he said sourly. “Not everyone has the freedom you have, me included.” “True. Can’t say it bothers me particularly.

There was that familiar aroma in the air of an incoming September storm – the kind that chills you deep down to your bones.

was. Is she ours? French? British?” For long seconds Caleb studied the incoming fleck. “Can’t tell.” “How many? We got the whole British

Because I love her!" Wren's shout is almost swallowed by the wind, but her words reach me as clearly as if she'd bent to whisper them in my ears. Everything seems to still - the growl of the incoming storm, the sway of the trees in the wind. Our eyes catch across the clearing. Wren's look, vividly fierce and beautifully soft at the same time, wrenches something inside me. I feel her heartbeat as if we were pressed together, chest to chest, cheek to cheek; I know its beat as surely as my own.

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

Fick’s eyes refocused, blinking from the cold wind of the incoming storm on his leathery face, he realized he was half-listening to some radio traffic. Something about some junior enlisted personnel caught fucking in the woods. Jesus Christ in an Alligator Fuckhouse, he thought, coming back from his unaccustomed philosophical maundering. What kind of goat-fellating third-world communist cock-suck military are they running around here?