Jeff Lowe Quotes

If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all.

I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

If you don't acquire the discipline to push through a personal low point, you will miss the reward that comes with persevering.

Still, it's always nice to be around somebody who thinks I am wonderful. It confirms my low opinion of people.

Will you excuse us all,” [Jeff] said, “if we admit that we find it hard to believe? There is no such-possibility-in the rest of the world.” Have you no kind of life where [asexual reproduction] is possible?” asked Zava. “Why, yes-some low forms, of course.” “How low-or how high, rather?

It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul. That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.

This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark. —MICHELANGELO BUONAROTTI

There are millions of homeless children in the world—which proved again that kids were a low-value commodity, didn’t it? I mean, there are very few homeless Bentleys in the world.

But do I have “low intelligence”?

Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why—not an average. An average is just lazy.

Far worse, though, was the low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you Desolation tries to colonize you.

Factoid: Within the class of nutrients called ‘carbohydrates’, there is no molecule that is essential for human health or well-being. This does not mean that blood sugar is completely unimportant, but rather that blood sugar can be well-maintained via metabolic processes such as gluconeogenesis without dietary carbohydrates in the keto-adapted human.

It took only three years for Jonathan Papelbon to surpass Bill Campbell, Lee Smith, Tom Gordon, Sparky Lyle, Derek Lowe, Jeff Reardon, Ellis Kinder, and Dick Radatz as he climbed the franchise leader board into second place all-time for saves. Papelbon closed out 2008 with 113 career saves—and on July 1, 2009, with his 20th save of the season he surpassed Bob Stanley to become the all-time franchise leader in saves.

A study at Cornell University found that low-level noise both lowered job motivation and increased stress levels. It appears as well that an open-office type of environment can contribute to musculoskeletal problems such as a stiff back or tense neck and even heart disease due to increased levels of epinephrine, a stress hormone.

On September 3, an especially hostile audience baited Johnson in Cleveland, where his behavior flirted with new lows. When a heckler yelled that Johnson should “hang Jeff Davis,” the president rejoined, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?”62 When someone in the crowd hollered, “Is this dignified?” Johnson shot back: “I care not for dignity.

Don't let the incidents which take place in life bring you low. And certainly don't whine. You can be brought low, that's OK, but don't be reduced by them. Just say, 'That's life.

It's never too late. You'll never feel ready

Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.

It was a little insulting to admit that a drooling dolt like Coulter might be right about something, but after all, Isaac Newton didn’t reject gravity just because the apple had a low IQ.

Values of TG/HDL-C over 3.5 indicate that you probably have pattern B with a predominance of small LDL particles, and a ratio this high indicates there’s a good chance you may also have insulin resistance[55].

Robert is, of course, at the theater, but it’s true that Jeff isn’t alone. Behind him, Lulu holds up two bottles of tequila, and behind her is Gene, Lulu’s . . . bed-friend, holding a bag of limes and sporting the world’s most enormous mustache. I take the bag of limes from him. “Are you guessing my weight tonight?” Jeff laughs in a loud bark before heading into the kitchen, but Gene does a bewildered double take. “What?” “Do I get to shoot a water gun to knock down the ducks?” I see the moment he gets it because his giant mustache twitches under his suppressed grin. “I’ll take my limes home if you’re going to be sassy, miss.” “You look like an old-timey auction barker,” I say. “Or Yosemite Sam. I have this sudden urge to buy a few head of cattle.” Behind me, Calvin snickers. “You wish you could grow a ’stache like this.” I burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I can’t even hear what you’re saying through that thing.” “I told him it’s awful.” Lulu tugs at it and Gene leans away. He smoothes it down proudly. “I’m so lazy, and this is much more low maintenance than shaving.” I don’t need to look that closely to see he’s clearly waxed and styled it with a comb. It’s really not an afterthought mustache; it’s the kind that a person chooses from a book on various mustache styles—the perfect accessory for his very carefully crafted I don’t care enough to even glance in the mirror look (which Lulu tells me takes him a long time in front of the mirror).

The look on her face in the empty lot—that blankness—and then, later, in the sessions, the warring of contempt, wildness, casual vulnerability, and vehemence, strength. That had laid him low. That had expanded until it hooked into the whole of him, no part of him not committed.

maintain muscle and other protein-containing tissues. But when you observe a human over a number of weeks of adaptation to a low carbohydrate diet, most of this initial inefficiency in protein use goes away[27]. Thus, once you are keto-adapted, your body’s need for protein isn’t much higher than during a ‘balanced diet’. This is a key fact in our understanding that low carbohydrate diets used in the long term do not need to be particularly high in protein. All the protein we eat (with the exception of stuff that is rubbed or cut off, like skin, hair, and nails) eventually gets burned for energy, yielding 4 Calories per gram. And you can’t “push” your body to build muscle by eating extra protein – muscle is built up under the stimulus of exercise (or illicit pharmaceuticals) as long as adequate protein is available at the time. No one has ever shown

Feeling Faint Issue: I’m happy losing weight with a low carbohydrate diet, but I’m always tired, get light headed when I stand up, and if I exercise for more than 10 minutes I feel like I’m going to pass out. Response: Congratulations on your weight loss success, and with just a small adjustment to your diet, you can say goodbye to your weakness and fatigue. The solution is salt…a bit more salt to be specific. This may sound like we’re crazy when many experts argue that we should all eat less salt, however these are the same experts who tell us that eating lots of carbohydrates and sugar is OK. But what they don’t tell you is that your body functions very differently when you are keto-adapted. When you restrict carbs for a week or two, your kidneys switch from retaining salt to rapidly excreting it, along with a fair amount of stored water. This salt and water loss explains why many people experience rapid weight loss in the first couple of weeks on a low carbohydrate diet. Ridding your body of this excess salt and water is a good thing, but only up to a point. After that, if you don’t replace some of the ongoing sodium excretion, the associated water loss can compromise your circulation The end result is lightheadedness when you stand up quickly or fatigue if you exercise enough to get ‘warmed up’. Other common side effects of carbohydrate restriction that go away with a pinch of added salt include headache and constipation; and over the long term it also helps the body maintain its muscles. The best solution is to include 1 or 2 cups of bouillon or broth in your daily schedule. This adds only 1-2 grams of sodium to your daily intake, and your ketoadapted metabolism insures that you pass it right on through within a matter of hours (allaying any fears you might have of salt buildup in your system). This rapid clearance also means that on days that you exercise, take one dose of broth or bouillon within the hour before you start.

So let’s consider an alternative diet, say 1200 kcal consisting of 30% protein, 15% carbs (i.e., 180 kcal or 45 grams), and 55% fat. After a week or two of getting adapted (during which you may experience some of the fuel limitation symptoms discussed above), your serum ketones rise up in the range (1-2 millimolar) where they meet at least half of the brain’s fuel supply. Now if you go for that 5 mile run, almost all of your body’s muscle fuel comes from fat, leaving your dietary carb intake plus gluconeogenesis from protein to meet the minor fraction of your brain’s energy need not provided from ketones. And, oh yes, after your run while on the low carb diet, your ketone levels actually go up a bit (not dangerously so), further improving fuel flow to your brain. So what does this mean for the rest of us who are not compulsive runners? Well, this illustrates that the keto-adapted state allows your body more flexibility in meeting its critical organ energy needs than a ‘balanced’ but energy-restricted diet. And in particular, this also means that your brain is a “carbohydrate dependent organ” (as claimed by the USDA Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee as noted in Chapter 3) ONLY when you are eating a high carbohydrate diet. When carbohydrate is restricted as in the example above, your body’s appropriate production of ketones frees the brain from this supposed state of ‘carbohydrate dependency’. And because exercise stimulates ketone production, your brain’s fuel supply is better supported during and after intense exercise when on a low carbohydrate diet than when your carbohydrate intake is high (see below).

He held my finger over the toilet at chest-level, let it dangle for several seconds, then dropped it. It landed with a small splash. "Adios, dear finger," said Mr. Burke. He flushed the toilet and watched happily. "Going . . . going . . ." I wondered if this was payback for his being dunked in the toilet once too often by bullies in school. "Going . . ." He frowned. "Aw, shit, it's still there. Fuckin' low-flow toilets.

Like his adversaries back in Wichita and Dodge, many hailed from Texas. But these weren’t drovers intent on a little wild fun. They dealt in cattle, too, but instead of herding them, they stole them. For that they acquired a generic nickname that eventually evolved into a complimentary description, but one that in 1880 was intended as a slur, a means of identifying men so low and violent that no evil act was considered beneath them: Cowboys.

He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street––especially when he punctuated the hit with the words "Patent that!"...This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution.

Dose response studies indicate a linear increase in skeletal muscle protein synthesis with ingestion of high quality protein up to about 20-25 grams per meal[127]. With protein intakes twice this amount, there is a marked increase in protein oxidation with no further increase in protein synthesis. When looked at over the course of a day, there is no credible evidence that protein intakes above 2.5 g/kg body weight lead to greater nitrogen balance or accumulation of lean tissue. Another reason to avoid eating too much protein is that it has a modest insulin stimulating effect that reduces ketone production. While this effect is much less gram-for-gram than carbohydrates, higher protein intakes reduce one’s keto-adaptation and thus the metabolic benefits of the diet.

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. As

Most people now have the ‘LDL-C is bad and HDL-C is good’ concept down pat. But there is more to the story. It is well established that not all LDL particles are created equal. Moreover, certain types of LDL have been shown to correlate with abnormal lipid profiles and promote atherosclerosis. As noted previously, the larger more buoyant LDL particles are less harmful than smaller ones. Small LDL particles reside in the circulation longer, have greater susceptibility to oxidative damage by free radicals, and more easily penetrate the arterial wall, contributing to atherosclerosis. No matter what your total LDL-C concentration, if you have relatively more small particles (referred to as Pattern B) it puts you at a several-fold higher risk for heart disease compared to people with larger LDL particles (Pattern A)[49]. And once again, this is independent of your LDL-C concentration.

Exercising an unfit muscle causes soreness, which is followed by improved muscle function and increased resistance of that muscle to become sore. In that sense, soreness after exercise is good (as long as it lasts less than a week and doesn’t come back). Sore joints, on the other hand, are collateral damage (see above). Most people think that if they do an intense workout (say 90 minutes of circuit training in a gym) that they should lose weight. And indeed, if you weigh before and right after such a workout, the scale goes down because of sweating and water weight loss. However, if it makes you sore for the next few days don’t be surprised to see the scale go up. That’s because muscle soreness indicates that your muscles are temporarily inflamed, and inflammation causes fluid retention and swelling in that muscle. Once again, don’t let the scale make you crazy. Once the soreness is gone, the swelling is gone, and the scale comes back down where it’s supposed to be.

You smell good. Who’s this ‘guy’ you’re meeting? Are you back on the market?” He wiggled both blond eyebrows at me. “Does that mean Doc Nyce is no longer petting your cat?” I frowned. “Petting my cat?” What did Bogart, our vegetarian cat, have to do with Doc? Jeff leaned in for another sniff. “I’m really good at petting cats, too.” Oh, dear Lord! My brain had finally dipped low enough into the gutter to catch Jeff’s meaning. I shoved him back a step. “Doc is still petting my …” No! Just walk away, doofus. I started to do just that, but then stopped and turned back. In case Tiffany was going to be hearing the play-by-play of my run-in with Jeff, I wanted to clarify things so the red-headed siren wouldn’t get any ideas about trying to steal Doc away from me. We’d done that song and dance before, and there would be no encores on that score. “Doc Nyce is still my boyfriend,” I announced. Sheesh, “boyfriend” was such a silly word for a woman my age. “I mean, we’re a definite couple in all the ways.” Jeff grinned. “Which ways are those?” “You know, the ‘couple’ ways.” When he just stared at me with a dumb grin, I added, “Boom, boom, out goes the lights.” His laughter rang out loud and clear, catching the attention of people on the opposite side of the street. “I’m not sure if you know this, Violet Parker, but that old song actually refers to landing a knock-out punch.” Thinking back on all the times I’d pinched, elbowed, and tackled Doc, including the black eye I’d accidentally given him, I shrugged. “Sex with Doc is amazingly physical. He’s a real heavy hitter under the sheets, delivering a solid one-two sock-’em every time.” I wasn’t sure what I was alluding to by this point, but I kept throwing out boxing slang to fill the void. “I’d give you the real dirty blow-by-blow, but we don’t sell ringside tickets for our wild sex matches.” His jaw gaped. “No kidding?” Before my big mouth unleashed another round of idiotic sex-boxing ambiguities, I said, “See you around, Jeff.

May we all work together towards that day when, walking down the street, we find that obesity is once again rare and no longer the norm.

a high carbohydrate diet blocks your ability to employ fat to fuel your brain, and to some degree, your muscles as well.

the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.

High Fat, Moderate Protein, Low Carb Breakfast Smoothies Recipes for ‘low carbohydrate’ smoothies abound, but most are also low in fat and assume that anything under 200 Calories from sugars qualifies as ‘low carb’. Here are two basic recipes that provide enough fat and protein to keep you satisfied until lunch, and both come in at or under10 grams of carbohydrates. Note that you have your choice of sweeteners, but the argument for adding some xylitol to the mix is that it does not raise your insulin level, provides useful energy, and protects your dental health. Also note that there are lots of different protein powders for sale, but most whey products are flavored and sweetened. Shop until you find unflavored whey powder with the lactose removed – the label should indicate about 15 grams of protein and less than one gram of carbohydrate per serving. Do not buy soy protein powder or whey/soy mix, as the soy does not dissolve well into the smoothie. This whey powder looks expensive (about $1 per 15 gram serving) but this is the same amount of protein as you get from 2 eggs. Breakfast Berry Smoothie Ingredients: 3 oz fresh or frozen (unsweetened) berries (strawberries, blueberries, or raspberries) ¼ cup whipping (or heavy) cream 1 tablespoon light olive oil 2 tablespoons unflavored whey protein powder (delactosed) sweetener of choice (e.g., 1 tablespoon xylitol and 1 packet Splenda) 2-3 oz ice Blend the ingredients at high speed until smooth (30-60 seconds) Protein 15 grams, Fat 25-30 grams, Carbs 10 grams, Calories 330-380

French Fried Green Beans Finger food to go with a steak or burger, or just by themselves for the fun of it! Ingredients: 1 pound of fresh green beans 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt ½ teaspoon black peppercorns or rose peppercorns ¼ teaspoon garlic powder ½ teaspoon dried Italian seasoning mix 1 egg white Pre-heat a deep fat fryer to 240oF (hot) –preferably filled with high oleic safflower oil Rinse green beans, trim, and pat dry on a towel Grind spices together in a mortar and pestle Whip egg white until foamy, then coat the green beans in egg, Put egg-coated beans in a 1-qt plastic bag and dust with ground spices, shake vigorously, and drop into hot oil. Fry for 2-3 minutes. Remove when the egg coating just starts to brown.

For example, until the mid-2010s many senior executives in traditional companies cackled that Amazon’s business still showed no profits. They felt it was a low-margin activity propped up by a hyperinflated share price. And within their traditional way of understanding corporate performance, they were right. But seen through a different frame, they were utterly wrong. Jeff Bezos had reframed the idea of commercial growth, away from producing annual returns for shareholders (and handing about a third of the profits to governments in the form of tax) and toward reinvesting every penny of net income to establish adjacent business lines, from Kindle books to cloud services. People see it plain as day in hindsight, but the new frame was incomprehensible to many in the moment.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle increased by 67 percent between the years of 2013 and 2017, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Traffic on the I-5 freeway into the city, and over the bridges to West Seattle and to the eastern suburbs, crawled to a standstill during rush hour. With restrictive land use regulations and neighborhood opposition limiting the construction of new housing, low-income families were displaced and homelessness on Seattle streets became sickeningly ubiquitous.

I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there’s sick everywhere

If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all¨

For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.

They were easily replaced—if not by breeding, then why not by adoption? There are millions of homeless children in the world—which proved again that kids were a low-value commodity, didn’t it? I mean, there are very few homeless Bentleys in the world.

For no other reason than because I was anxious and bored, I took out my cell phone and tried to call her again. It still didn’t work. “That won’t work in here,” Samantha said in her slow and happy voice. “Yes, I know,” I said. “Then you should stop trying,” she said. I know I was new to having human feelings, but I was pretty certain that the one she was inspiring in me was annoyance verging on loathing. “Is that what you’ve done?” I said. “Given up?” She shook her head slowly with a kind of low-pitched two-syllable chuckle. “No way,” she said. “Not me.” “Then for God’s sake, why are you doing this? Why did you trap me in here and now you just sit there and smirk?” She

He made his way down to the creek, down a five-foot muddy bank to a band of sand too narrow to lie down on. He had to force his way through honeysuckle vines and the branches of low wild cherry trees, so his approach was clumsy, noisy. As he slid to his feet, a great blue heron croaked loudly just off to his left and at the same time rose out and flew away — complaining — to land on the far side of the creek. From there, the bird stared at Jeff. Jeff stared back, not moving, except for the smile on his mouth. The bird decided Jeff was harmless and paced slowly upstream, its attention on the shallow water where prey might be found. The long stilty legs, the long curved neck, the awkward perfect body moved inland, away from Jeff. He watched it. He watched it not find anything to eat, watched it come to a rest and blend into the stillness of a dead tree that had fallen out into the creek. The two men were still inside when Jeff rejoined them. The Professor looked at his face and said, “You like it.” Jeff nodded. “I saw a blue heron.” “They’re common around here,” the agent said. “You-all birdwatchers?” But the Professor remembered and understood what Jeff meant. “You take that as a sign from the gods?” Jeff nodded.

they turned around to head down — and Jeff crawled onto the deck to pull down the jib — he saw a blue heron standing on a little muddy point of land across the creek. He pointed and Dicey followed his eyes. The blue raised its flat head to look at them. Its feet were in the water, its feathers slightly ruined as if by a recent annoyance. Jeff watched the bird, waiting for it to take off, anticipating the squawk with which it would trumpet its disapprovals. But the blue seemed not to find them threatening. It stared across the creek at them, then turned its back on them in a stately gesture of dismissal. Jeff knew the bird knew they were there. But, from all you could tell, the bird had never noticed them. It raised its head to look out across the marsh, unconcerned, solitary, ignoring them with great determination. Dicey’s low voice told him to pull down the mainsail, and he did. When he had it gathered around the boom, he looked back to the bird. The great blue still stood there, its back still to them. It wasn’t going to let the suspicion that they were there chase it off of its fishing territory. Jeff wrapped the sheet around the loosely furled mainsail and went up to the bow to fend off. Dicey concentrated on maneuvering the boat, propelled now only by its own weight. Her hand rested on the tiller as she waited patiently for the sluggish hull to respond to her directions. The landing was perfect. Jeff held onto a piling with one hand while he looped a clove hitch around it. Then he looked back at Dicey. “You know who that bird reminds me of? You.” Her expression changed, and he didn’t know what he’d said wrong. Then he saw that the change was caused by Dicey trying to hold back laughter. “I was thinking how much it was like you,” she told him.

Then the streets suddenly exploded into life, with ancient cars, bicycles, crowds of people flowing over the sidewalks, and some very strange-looking buses that were pulled by diesel trucks. They were twice as long as an American bus, and shaped something like the letter M with the two ends going up like wings and then sloping down to a flat-roofed low spot in the middle. They were all packed so full of people that it seemed impossible for anyone else to get on, but as I watched one of them stopped, and sure enough, another clump of people crowded in. “Camels,” Chutsky said, and I stared at him curiously. “Excuse me?” I said. He jerked his head at one of the strange buses. “They’re called camels,” he said. “They’ll tell you it’s because of the shape, but my guess is it has to do with the smell inside at rush hour.” He shook his head. “You get four hundred people inside there, coming home from work, no air-conditioning and the windows don’t open. Unbelievable.

loop (a

Good thing you’re tagging all those “Low Priority” tasks. God forbid you’d ever lose track of shit that’s not worth doing.

It wasn't the worst time when Melody left me," the Professor said. "The worst time was the years before. Because I didn't know I couldn't hate anybody that much; it was like she'd stuck a sword into me, one of those Japanese samurai swords, do you know the kind I mean? Heavy and razor sharp-and she'd stuck it in me and then she was...pushing it around." His hand rested on his stomach, remembering. "I couldn't get free from the feelings. I didn't know how frightened I could be, all the time. But whenever we had to go out together, she'd smile at me and talk to me and listen and look at me the way she did-and I wanted to hit her," he said, his voice low and ashamed. Jeff let his head down to rest on his fists. "When I found out how many lies she was telling me, I finally realized that she had always lied to me. About my lectures. About boyfriends; and even after she knew I knew, she'd still lie about it. I hated her. Or the bills she ran up, without asking, without telling; then she'd say she'd taken care of them but she just-ignore them. I know I looked all right to other people-maybe more of a dry stick than usual, maybe even more of boring than usual-but inside I was knotted up, all the time, because I hated her so much, and I hated myself, and I was scared." Jeff looked up at his father. "I didn't think she'd do that to you, Jeff," the Professor said. "But she did, didn't she." Jeff nodded. He knew he was crying, but he didn't know what to do about it. Neither did the Professor. He just sat and waited, until Jeff got up to blow his nose. "It was the lies," the Professor said. "They were what really scared me. Even now, if I think about her-and the kinds of things she says....I don't know what she told you, but I never was sorry I'd married her or loved her because of you. You always made a difference, made a real difference, from the very beginning. I always knew that, inside me, but I didn't bother to learn how to show you. I'm sorry, Jeff, I should have taken the trouble.

Still, it's always nice to be around somebody who thinks I am wonderful. It confirms my low opinion of people.

IT'S THAT MOON AGAIN, SLUNG SO FAT AND LOW IN THE tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul.

IT'S THAT MOON AGAIN, SLUNG SO FAT AND LOW IN THE tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul. That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.

Part of this problem lies with how we do ‘science’. The paradigm of ‘modern science’ is that we isolate each individual factor and study it in isolation. This is the ‘reductionist’ approach to discovering scientific truth. This is straight forward and relatively easy to do, so lots of scientists swear by it. But what if a clinical problem like insulin resistance is not due to a single domino, but rather a number of dysfunctional proteins or other structural materials in combination? The answer – the reductionist approach can’t deliver an answer in this situation. If multiple steps in a pathway, working in varying combinations, eventually compromise that pathway’s action, the reductionist paradigm fails. But if one takes a more holistic or cosmopolitan approach to assessing the problem, the cause of the problem might be better appreciated.

Jackie gave a low gurgling laugh that made my toes curl and beamed at me. “Thanks,” she said. “Sergeant Morgan—your sister—we worked on it this weekend. At Bennie’s.” Bennie’s was a cop bar, a place where off-duty police officers hung out—and sometimes stopped in for a quick snort while on duty. The clientele was not known to be friendly to non-cops who wandered in. If Deborah had taken Jackie to Bennie’s, they had clearly bonded even more than I’d realized. “It’s a really good place for background,” Jackie said. “I have to send the writers there to see it.” She winked at Deborah. “We did tequila shots. She’s not so tough with a couple of drinks under her belt.” Debs snorted, but didn’t say anything.

Of course, that made it seem even worse: I had killed for room service. What a terrible, low creature I was. I wondered whether I should feel cheap and tawdry, or perhaps just jaded and callous. How much lower could I sink? I was already indifferent to the suffering of my victims, so I couldn’t really try to make that fit a new and colder me, if there actually was one.

I am pretty sure that some level of my brain was still working, because apparently it reminded me to breathe. But all the higher mental functions seemed to be completely shut down; little fragments of thought scuttled past but none of them seemed able to pull themselves together into anything I could actually think or say. I felt another breath come in and then go out and I was dimly aware that a certain amount of time had passed and that the silence was getting uncomfortably long—but I really couldn’t bring together enough of the scurrying pieces of thought to make up a real sentence. Slowly, painfully, the wheels turned, and finally single words came back to me—bastard … kill … detective—and at last, with that third word, a picture floated up out of the scampering neurons and rose to the top of my swirling nonthoughts—a glowering, knuckleheaded portrait of a human ape with a low brow and a mean smile, and at last I had one entire syllable that made sense. “Hood,” I said. “He called you?

IT WAS FULL DARK OUT NOW AND THE FIRST RUSH OF THE FREE night air roared into my lungs and out through my veins, calling my name with a thundering whisper of welcome and urging me on into the purring darkness, and we hurried to the car to ride away to happiness. But as we opened the car door and put one foot in, some small acid niggle twitched at our coattails and we paused; something was not right, and the frigid glee of our purpose slid off our back and onto the pavement like old snakeskin. Something was not right. I looked around me in the hot and humid Miami night. The neighborhood was just as it had always been; no sudden threat had sprung from the row of one-story houses with their toy-littered yards. There was nothing moving on our street, no one lurking in the shadows of the hedge, no rogue helicopter swooping down to strafe me—nothing. But still I heard that nagging trill of doubt. I took in a slow lungful of air through my nose. There was nothing to smell beyond the mingled odors of cooking, the tang of distant rainfall, the whiff of rotting vegetation that always lurked in the South Florida night. So what was wrong? What had set the tinny little alarm bells to clattering when I was finally out the door and free? I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing—but I had learned to trust the pesky whisper of warning, and I stood there unmoving, unbreathing, straining for an answer. And then a low row of dark clouds rumbled open overhead and revealed a small slice of silvery moon—a tiny, inadequate moon, a moon of no consequence at all, and we breathed out all the doubt. Of course—we were used to riding out into the wicked gleam of a full and bloated moon, slicing and slashing to the open-throated sound track of a big round choir in the sky. There was no such beacon overhead tonight, and it didn’t seem right somehow to gallop off into glee without it. But tonight was a special session, an impromptu raid into a mostly moonless evening, and in any case it must be done, would be done—but done as a solo cantata this time, a cascade of single notes without a backup singer. This small and wimpish quarter-moon was far too young to warble, but we could do very well without it, just this once. And

We set our strategy on what we perceive are the big customer needs. These things are very stable in time. If you base your strategy in things that are going to change, then you constantly need to change your strategy. If you base your strategy on customer needs, those tend to be stable over time. In the big things, people are the same everywhere. They all want low prices, vast selection, and accurate, fast, convenient delivery. Those things won’t change

Managing the metabolic mayhem in someone with insulin resistance by increasing dietary carbohydrate is like using a flame-thrower to fight a house fire.

We want products in stock and immediately available to customers, and we want minimal total inventory in order to keep associated holding costs, and thus prices, low. To achieve both, there is a right amount of inventory. We use historical purchase data to forecast customer demand for a product and expected variability in that demand. We use data on the historical performance of vendors to estimate replenishment times. We can determine where to stock the product within our fulfillment network based on inbound and outbound transportation costs, storage costs, and anticipated customer locations.

The potential size of a network of physical stores is exciting. However, we don’t know how to do it with low capital and high returns; physical-world retailing is a cagey and ancient business that’s already well served; and we don’t have any ideas for how to build a physical world store experience that’s meaningfully differentiated for customers.

High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter.

So why bother anointing a twenty-seven-year-old general manager and giving me the reins? Well, it was a training ground. I learned how to be a GM, and be an owner, when the stakes were low.

Amazon was indeed hit hard by the internet-bubble collapse. Its stock was at $106 a share in December 1999 when our Person of the Year issue came out. A month later it was down 40 percent. Within two years it had fallen to as low as $6 a share.

I have found that two people of the same weight can take a certain dose of Vitamin D3 and have two completely different changes in the blood level of their D3. For example, I know of two people, about the same weight, they both started taking 20,000 IU of D3 per day. One’s blood level of D3 skyrocketed to 180+ ng/ml  while the other’s blood level barely budged from 30   to  50  ng/ml. We call them high responders and low responders. The reasons for this are not yet clear, but it might have to do with the differing levels of magnesium in their systems. Anyway, the highly preferred way to conduct research or monitor patients

Alternatively, it’s possible these age trends have nothing to do with generational changes in grit. Instead, what the data may be showing is how people mature over time. My own experience, and the stories of grit paragons like Jeff Gettleman and Bob Mankoff suggest that, indeed, grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

The light at dusk was a low blaze, a brightness.

With AWS and its pay-as-you-go model, an entrepreneur could spend maybe a hundred bucks and launch in a few minutes—the time it took to fill out a form and tap in a credit card number. The implication of low startup costs was that there would be a lot more startups. Those startups also could get to market faster.

The only things companies should build themselves are the things that are core to their business. A lot of times people end up building things where there’s already a product you could buy or license for a relatively low cost. Should you build your own benefits and payroll system?

That low-grade anxiety is starting to buzz in my head.

Jeff’s expression changed from confused to mad to upset as he looked from one of them to the other. When he appeared to have made up his mind, he tossed down his napkin and rose. “Well.” It was all he got out. Delilah got her only satisfaction from the fact that the goon was in a booth, and he didn’t make it all the way to standing before he hit his thighs against the table and had to scoot out, ungracefully, to the side. “Goodnight.” He raised his weak chin high and stamped out of the bar like a child. Delilah let loose in a low growl, and it cost her every effort to keep her response to mere words. If she’d had her way, her focus was strong enough to create a small wind around her and make her eyes burn red. But her witchcraft had cost her enough already where Brandon was concerned. Even though she was mad enough to burn all bridges and say to hell with it, she kept it in check. “What are you doing?” He laughed. “What, you don’t remember Tiger and Muffin?” She drew a deep breath and held her emotions on tight rein. The waitress chose that moment to saunter her bare belly up to their booth and ask if they wanted anything else. Delilah merely ground out the word ‘no.’ The waitress didn’t seem to notice, simply smiled and said ‘thank you,’ instantaneously producing a check and sliding it to the middle of the table, before she sauntered away. Great, Delilah thought, the obnoxious Jeff had downed five very over-priced snobby beers and she was stuck with the bill. She didn’t think this could get any worse. /> But Brandon had her pinned into the booth, the fake sad look gone from his face. The humor now missing as well. Which was just fine, since she didn’t have any of her own. She asked him again. “What are you doing here in my booth?” “Running your date off. Sparing him memory loss and who knows what.” He reached out and snaked her mojito away, before taking a healthy gulp. “That’s mine!” His smile resembled a shark’s. “After everything else we’ve done, sharing a glass isn’t going to kill you.” He took another drink, draining half of what remained and a lot of her sanity. “I had to save the dweeb from you.” “He didn’t need saving.” She tried again to push past him, but he didn’t budge. “So you weren’t going to take him home and screw his brains out and make him forget everything?” She was so shocked by his blunt but accurate assessment of their first night together that she didn’t think, just blurted out, “No!” That startled Brandon, and he asked, “why not?” out of genuine curiosity, before she could regroup. “I didn’t like him.” Crap, that was a whole other can of worms. She sat back, at last resigned to this going from bad to worse. It was Brandon’s turn to be startled.

New York is surprisingly at risk. First, it’s on an estuary. The Hudson River, which runs along the west side of the city, needs an exit. So unlike with a harbor city like, say, Tokyo, or a city on a lagoon like Venice, you can’t just wall New York off from the rising ocean. Second, there are a lot of low areas, including the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts and Lower Manhattan, which have been enlarged by landfill over the years (if you compare the map of damage from Sandy in 2012 with a map of Manhattan in 1650, you’ll see that they match pretty well—almost all the flooding occurred in landfill areas). The amount of real estate at risk in New York is mind-boggling: 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion stand in flood zones today, with thousands more buildings at risk with each foot of sea-level rise. In addition, New York has a lot of industrial waterfront, where toxic materials and poor communities live in close proximity, as well as a huge amount of underground infrastructure—subways, tunnels, electrical systems. Finally, New York is a sea-level-rise hotspot. Because of changes in ocean dynamics, as well as the fact that the ground beneath the city is sinking as the continent recovers from the last ice age, seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average.

5. The Salt Paradox When the human body adapts to a low carb diet, the kidneys fundamentally change how they handle sodium. Removing most carbs from the diet causes your kidneys to aggressively secrete sodium (and along with it, extra fluid). This is why many people experience a dramatic early weight loss with carb restriction. But this means that a continuous moderate intake of sodium is necessary to keep your circulation adequate to handle ‘heat stresses’ like hot weather, endurance activity, or even a hot shower. If you are eating less than 60 grams of carbohydrate per day, you need to purposefully add 2-3 grams of sodium to your daily intake (unless you are still taking diuretic medication under a doctor’s direction for high blood pressure or fluid retention).

We humans are about 2/ 3 water. Each of us contains about 40 liters (or quarts) of the stuff, and each liter weighs a bit over 2 pounds. Our bodies effectively regulate fluid balance by adjusting urine output and sense of thirst, but this is done within a 2-liter range. Within this range, your body doesn’t really care if it is up to a liter above or below its ideal fluid level. What this means is that we all live inside a 4-pound-wide grey zone, so that from day to day we fluctuate up or down (i.e., plus or minus) 2 pounds. This happens more or less at random, so with any one weight reading you don’t know where your body is within that fluid range. Your weight can be the same for 3 days in a row, and the next morning you wake up and the scale says you’ve ‘gained’ 3 pounds for no apparent reason. For people who weigh themselves frequently, this can be maddening.

Inside the Lakers’ locker room, the reaction was subdued euphoria. Ceballos was an obnoxious brat who played no defense and went AWOL. Horry, on the other hand, was a 6-foot-9 outside gunner (he was a lifetime 34 percent three-point shooter) and low-post defender joining an operation in need of long-range shooting and low-post defense. It was a trade that, by NBA standards, generated little attention. It was a trade that changed everything. Suddenly, instead of being a towel-throwing pain on an 11-24 team going nowhere fast, Horry was a coveted piece of a first-place club that sat 17 games over .500. During his first four NBA seasons, all with the Rockets, Horry had learned how to play with Hakeem Olajuwon, the 7-foot, 255-pound Nigerian center. He knew his job was to feed off the big man, and that a box score where Olajuwon scored 30 and Horry scored 12 usually meant Houston won. Now, with the Lakers, he was more than happy to acknowledge O’Neal’s place as the center of the basketball universe.

It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss. Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.4

tactical advantages of low margins and low prices, in order to win points of market share

Now fast forward to the present. The United States is currently re-assessing a 3-decade, uncontrolled experiment in which carbohydrates were lauded and fats demonized. Concurrently we have become one of the most obese countries in the world. And across the globe, tragically, indigenous peoples with historically low carbohydrate intakes now have extremely high prevalence rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes (e.g., the Gulf States in the Middle East, Pacific Islanders, First Nations in Canada, and Australian Aborigines).

The GTT he administered showed severe reactive hypoglycemia (RHG). At that time, one of the many criticisms of Dr. Atkins was that he diagnosed many with RHG. For this he was called a “quack”. After seeing the lab results, I immediately began the Induction phase of his diet and soon felt better, just as his patients did. As long as I ate correctly and didn’t skip meals I rarely experienced my prior symptoms. That remains true to this day. This was my first lesson in the power of practical nutrition (albeit outside of mainstream medical opinion). I am convinced that if I hadn’t followed Dr. Atkins advice I would have had type 2 diabetes long ago. I can thank him for many things but most especially for that.

Consider the recent uncontrolled experiment in which approximately 200 million adults in the United States have been encouraged to consume higher levels of dietary carbohydrate in place of fat. In the same time frame, more than half of us have ended up overweight or obese. The results from this national level experience point us to the logical conclusion that the ability to remain healthy with increasing levels of carbohydrate is limited to a subset of the population. Therefore determining who those people are and what characteristics give them the ability to consume carbohydrate without untoward effects is a major question that can and should be addressed.

Keep technology in its place. There are some things that computers and other high-tech devices handle remarkably well. And there are some things that still go more smoothly with paper and pencil or similarly low-tech implements. Until voice recognition technology is part of all computers and until powerful computers are so tiny they can be built into the handle of your kitchen cabinet, it makes sense to keep your file of recipes right where they are in your card file box, not on a computer disk. Someday, home computers may be slick enough to produce recipes as quickly as you can say "chicken curry with noodles." For now, entering recipes into your computer and retrieving them each time you want to use them is definitely more bother than it's worth. Chances are, you won't use them.

The pattern in the New World is similar to what happened during the European colonization of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In all those regions Europeans gained near-total political power for a time, but they continued to remain a small minority of the population. No one bothers to claim that Europeans committed “genocide” in these Old World regions; but in the New World and Australia, they take advantage of low initial population densities in some regions to press unsubstantiated claims of mass slaughter.

Amazon’s low-price strategy is well documented. For nearly two decades, Jeff has proven that he is willing to make less on an item—or an entire line of products—in the short term to guarantee the long-term growth of the business.