Kevin The Office Quotes

He walked out of the office to find Kevin Daley standing there. 'I like your style,' Kevin said. Thank you,' Alex said. 'I like it, too.

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers, Kouri observes—a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others—are also shared by politicians and world leaders: individuals running not from the police, but for office. Such a profile, notes Kouri, allows those who present with it to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral, or legal consequences of their actions.

In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and members of their cabinet held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office declaring that the United States government was based on biblical principles

Okay, i admit it," Connor looked away, "I'm a little disappointed." "Excuse me?" snapped Kevin, sure he hadn't heard right. "Well, now that I'm thoroughly and diligently queer, I expected more manly love-talk, you know? Not like Pretty Baby and feeding you graped and stuff," he snorted. "Uh, you mean like, hey you bastard I don't have a beer and nobody's sucking my dick, what's wrong with this picture?" "Oh," Connor climbed Kevin a little, his cock becoming interested again. "That's the spirit." "Like, I've got handcuffs and I'm not afraid to yo use them, that kind of talk?" "Oh, officer, show me your nightstick." "I'm not even a cop anymore." "No but oddly enough, I am." Connor grinned, holding Kevin's hands above his head. "And you there, are looking a little guilty." "Oh man," Kevin bit his lip. "I just can't help myself, Officer Dougal. I've been such a bad, bad boy." "Oh, well then, son, I guess you'll just have to spead 'em." He slid down beneath the covers, "This will require some in depth observation, I think." Kevin's cock was getting hard again as Connor's tongue lapped all the way down on it then back up again, teasing the little slit in the top. "Yep, just as I thought, blunt instrument. I'm afraid you'll have to come with me...

I’ll forever be grateful to my childhood pastor for making me read the Heidelberg Catechism and meet in his office with him to talk about it before I made a profession of faith in the fourth grade. I was nervous to meet with him, even more nervous to meet before all the elders. But both meetings were pleasant. And besides, I was forced to read through all 129 questions and answers at age nine.That was a blessing I didn’t realize at the time. Ever since then I’ve had a copy of the Catechism and have grown to understand it and cherish it more and more over the years.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing.

I’ll do it,” she said before she could talk herself out of it. His dimples flashed as he slapped a hand over his heart in mock surprise. “Just like that?” “Did you want me to argue with you first?” “Hell no, but I had pictured this conversation going somewhat differently. You’d get all offended I didn’t think you could do your job and then you’d get all pissed off and accuse me of trying to be the boss of you and then…” “And then?” “And then I had kinda pictured us having make-up sex. And then christening-the-new-office-chair sex. And maybe christening-the-old-office-desk sex because, as far as I know, it was never christened. And—

Kevin's dad grabs the policeman holding his son and yells at him, and when another officer pulls him off, Tails gets the police officer in a headlock. One board member slams his fist as hard as he can into the hood of the police car. Maggan Lyt takes photographs of all the police officers from a distance of less than half a yard, and promises them all personally that they'll lose their jobs.

A heavily built man in uniform grabs Kevin's arm and lifts him up from his seat and the whole bus explodes in fury. Bobo and Lyt try to block the policeman's path and they're big enough to require four more officers just to get him off the bus. Kevin looks so small in the confusion, vulnerable, defenseless. Perhaps that's why all the adults react the way that they do or perhaps there are thousands of other reasons.

Clergymen responded enthusiastically. Many ministers wrote the Los Angeles office to request copies of Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian treatise The Road to Serfdom and anti–New Deal tracts by Herbert Hoover and libertarian author Garet Garrett, all of which had been advertised in Spiritual Mobilization. Some sought reprints of the bulletin itself. “I found your last issue of Spiritual Mobilization excellent,” a Connecticut clergyman reported. “Could you send me 100 copies to distribute to key people in my parish? I am quite anxious to get my people thinking along this line.” Others took more indirect routes in spreading the organization’s message. “Occasionally I preach a sermon directly on your theme,” a midwestern minister wrote, “but equally important, it is in the background of my thought as I prepare all my sermons, meet various groups and individuals.

Riveted by these events, reporters gave little thought to the hearings taking place that afternoon in Room 424 of the Senate Office Building, where a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee sat to consider a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States. If passed, it would have declared, “This Nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”1 The campaign

There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. "The 'hubba-hubba' climate was tolerated," he recalled. "I was told the editors would ask the girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.

literally rocketing into the sky at a seemingly impossible steep pitch as it activated for the first and only time in its history a classified system the presidential plane possessed to speed emergency launches. “There are only two 747s in the world that can take off like that—and they’re both called Air Force One,” a flight steward said, leaning over to one of the passengers. On the ground, the local Sarasota police who had been on escort duty watched in awe. “I’ve never seen a plane take off like that,” Officer Kevin Dowd recalled. “From where we were looking at it, it looked like it was going almost straight up.

Once more Mary Jo, Bobby, Kevin, Dennis, Raymond, Lucille, Frankie, Coddles, Lyle, John, Andy, Miss Ursula, Jim, Lonnie, Postmaster Jones, William, Travis, Todd, Tony, Dennis M. . . . On the ride home from Sheriff’s office, everyone was again on porches or at windows. Daron didn’t call out their names this time, and this time no one waved. Where do the black people live? In the front yards! It was funny. (I guess that’s better than the back of the bus, Louis had later added. Daron had thought that funny, too.) Louis’s absence was always noticeable. Though skinny, he’d filled space like a fat man on a crowded elevator, except a welcome addition, not someone who provoked strangers to regard each other with situational solidarity. He had, in fact, induced people to regard each other with suspicion, to question the known.

But what about the spot brokers themselves? A few drifted to banks where they became traders or, more commonly, salesmen. Some simply retired or found work outside finance. Anecdotally, a number of them became London black-cab drivers. In around 2003 I met one who had done just that. I struck up a conversation with him as he took me home from the office; his name was Mickey. ‘I used to be a spot broker,’ he told me after he found out where I worked, ‘it was great.’ We reminisced for a while about the way the FX market had been, then, as we approached my street, he said, a little sadly, ‘But it had to end, we couldn’t beat the computers – they ate us all alive.’ We arrived outside my house where I got out and paid him. As he began to drive off, he slowed down and shouted back at me, ‘They ate us alive – and they’ll do it to everyone!’ With that, he turned the corner and drove out of sight.

Let us not be deceived about the cool forms, forms indifferent to themselves, which this fetishism can assume in Warhol. Behind this machinic snobbery, what is really going on is a rise and rise of objects, images, signs and simulacra, as well as a rise and rise of values, the finest example of which is the art market itself. We are a long way from the alienation of price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the ecstasy of value, which explodes the notion of market and simultaneously destroys the art work as such. Warhol is naturally party to this extermination of the real by the image, and to such an overdoing of the image as to put an end to all aesthetic value. Warhol reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. In this sense, we cannot say he is not a great artist: fortunately for him, he is not an artist at all. The point of his work is a challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics.

Split is doing well at the box office around the world, but it misrepresents people with dissociative identity disorder (DID; previously called multiple personality disorder). The trailer is particularly gripping, luring in audiences by depicting a man with DID kidnapping and preparing to torture three teenage girls. Kevin (played by James McAvoy) juggles 24 personalities that are based on stereotypes: a cutesy 9-year-old infatuated with Kanye West, a flamboyant designer, and the “Beast,” a superhuman monster who sees the girls as “sacred food.” Kevin falsely represents people with DID through exaggerated symptoms, extreme violence, and unrealistic physical characteristics. The senior author, an expert in DID, has not seen any DID patient who is this violent in 25 years of clinical practice. Kevin’s ghastly personalities are so over-the-top that terrifying scenes are making audiences laugh.

Swan felt enormous pride when in 2011 Euromoney magazine named him the world’s ‘finance minister of the year’. There was an almost audible dropping of jaws around the departments of Treasury, Finance, and Prime Minister and Cabinet. In fact, the core policy work throughout this period was undertaken by Ken Henry, Nigel Ray and David Gruen in Treasury, Jim Chalmers in the treasurer’s office, and Andrew Charlton and Steven Kennedy in my own. Swan’s talent, in fact, may have lain in knowing to not get in their way – and for some ministers, this was an important attribute.

At my “office” I wear an AR visor on my forehead. The visor is a curved band about hand width wide that is held a few inches away from my eyes for extra comfort during daylong use. The powerful visor throws up virtual screens all around me. I have about 12 virtual screens of all sizes and large data sets I can wrestle with my hands. The visor provides enough resolution and speed that most of my day I am communicating with virtual colleagues. But I see them in a real room, so I am fully present in reality as well. Their photorealistic 3-D avatar captures their life-size likeness accurately. My coworkers and I usually sit at a virtual table in a real room while we work independently, but we can walk around each other’s avatar. We converse and overhear each other just as if we are in the same room. It is so convenient to pop up an avatar that even if my real coworker is on the other side of the real room, we’ll just meet in the AR rather than walk across the gap.

Further, these continuums are the mechanical devices which the Supreme Court proscribed against using in the Graham decision. To quote Thomas Petrowski, FBI SAC and attorney (October, 2002; FBI Bulletin), “Unfortunately, many law enforcement agencies have adopted training in the guise of a “force continuum,” which is precisely the mechanical application that the Court proscribed…it is inconsistent with the concept of reasonableness. Most use-of-force continua indicate a reflective approach to a menu of force options with the goal of selecting the least intrusive option. While virtually every force continuum provides that such progressing through force options may not be appropriate in all use-of-force situations, the seed of hesitation is inescapably planted. The word continuum implies a sequential approach. The goal of force continua – using the least intrusive means to respond to a threat – simply is not constitutionally required. The law does not require officers to select the minimum force necessary, only a reasonable option.

One of the reasons that my wife appreciated Valentine’s Day this year is because we spent uninterrupted time together. She often complains that I am not fully present with her even when we’re together; she says I’m either checking emails, on the phone, or glued to a screen. Though I don’t appreciate her complaints, I do realize that what she says is true; her case against my frequent screen distractions is not unfounded. Much of that screen time is office related, and the further I move up in management, the less time I seem to have in the evenings to be fully present with my family. To be honest, even when I’m not checking email, my mind is still preoccupied with work and the tasks I didn't finish at the office. When my wife goes to bed, I end up catching up on emails that went unanswered during the day. I finally go to bed when I am too tired to continue, only to wake up the next day and start the cycle all over again. I really do feel like a hamster in a wheel. During my first few years at the company, this wasn’t a big deal. Plus, email wasn’t like it is today. Now I feel like I’m under a continual barrage of email, texts, and documents, and to be honest, it’s exhausting. I am losing motivation to keep moving forward with my company. I’m starting to see that it is impacting my relationship with my wife and kids, and I’m not sure what to do about that. It would be helpful to talk through my options.

Officers,” Big Nick said. “Sheesh.

He was also the big man Harmon had beaten in his first combatives match in the competition. Big Nick didn’t hold a grudge about his loss, and Harmon appreciated that, though he may hold a grudge forever now, since he had been promoted to officer. The thought made Harmon smile.

Big Nick,” Lieutenant Marteen Yatarward asked, “you alright? You look a little nervous.” “Of course I look nervous!” the big man exclaimed. “You let Captain Tomeral promote me, and now I’m a stinking officer, and the executive officer of a light battlecruiser. What kind of friend are you?

Hey!” Bradford called over Mike’s comms. “Somebody link us in. We’re almost ready up here. Ask that Harmon guy what his plan is.” “My plan?” Harmon asked loud enough for Bradford to hear him. “Yeah, I mean…I’m a retired staff sergeant, not an officer. I worked for a living,” Bradford said.

AMERICANS -- U.S. NAVY, ABOARD MINESWEEPER USS PELICAN (AM 49), MANILA BAY Alton C. Ingram, Lieutenant. “Todd,” Commanding Officer Frederick J. Holloway, Lt. (jg), Operations Officer. Oliver P. Toliver, III, Lt. (jg) “Ollie,” Gunnery Officer. Bartholomew, Leonard (n), Chief Machinists Mate, “Rocky,” Chief Engineer. Farwell, Luther A., Quartermaster Second Class, Top helmsman. Hampton, Joshua P., Electronics Technician 1st Class, Crew Whittaker, Peter L., Engineman 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Kevin T. Quartermaster 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Brian I., Quartermaster Striker, Crew Yardly, Ronald R., Pharmacist's Mate Second Class “Bones,” Crew. Sunderland, Kermit G. Gunner's Mate 1st Class, Crew. AMERICANS

A special operations element known as Zaslon is reportedly directly subordinate to the SVR director. Zaslon is responsible for protecting senior Russian embassy officials and other Russian government officials when they travel to dangerous locations. For example, Zaslon officers provided security when then-Russian Vice Prime Minister Dmitriy Rogozin traveled to Syria in 2014. The element also conducts covert action missions. Little is publicly known about the group, but it reportedly was created in 1998 to replace special forces units that had been subordinate to the KGB First Chief Directorate during the Soviet era and moved to the Ministry of Security after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

You as the leader need to be aware of the communication that isn’t happening. You as the leader need to be aware of the communication that perhaps you take for granted when you and your team are in an office environment, where the teams can walk down the hall, have that quick conversation, and be connected. You as the leader need to be deliberate in your communication so that you can fill in the gaps where important information might be missing.

How to Leave the Office at 5:00—Without Guilt

of experience at the Privy Council Office who was hired to be an editor of the French translation but ended up being a primary editor of the entire report. I headed

As eminent police psychologist and fellow ILEETA member Dr. Alexis Artwohl, Phd. has stated, “the goal of use of force investigations is: 1) Maximize the thoroughness and accuracy of the investigation while; 2) Minimizing the trauma to the officer and their families. Dr. Artwohl expounds that the investigator is not getting a statement about what really happened but is rather getting a statement of witness “perceptions.” Determining the reality of the case or the facts of the case is based on physical evidence and these witness statements. Witnesses interviewed can be participants – the officer(s) and suspect(s) as well as observers. Their perception-based statements are based on what they: saw, heard, felt, smelled, their beliefs, attitudes, biases and expectations. Of course the more you able to learn about the person the better your ability to ascertain their influence on the person’s statements. “The person may be telling the truth and they may be lying. We define a lie as they are deliberately and consciously telling you something that is different than what is in their head.” Dr. Artwohl states that oftentimes police officers are disciplined based on an investigators “interpretation of their intent.

My sales career began thirty years ago selling office equipment for Lanier, something like the “Marine Corps” of business-to-business sales.

Requiring officers to find and choose the least intrusive alternative would require them to exercise superhuman judgment. Imposing such a requirement would inevitably induce tentativeness by officers, and thus deter police from protecting the public and themselves.” —Scott v. Heinrich, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud based service and is a subscription-based version of Office 2013. Unlike any of the traditional Office suites such as Office 2010, Office 365 allows you to install Office applications on up to five different computers. It includes some additional features, such as Office on Demand, 20 GB of additional online storage space through SkyDrive, and the option to install Office 2011 on Mac computers.

He negotiated union with Zanzibar in 1964, and thus became president of the Republic of Tanzania, 1964–85, when he became one of the few African presidents of his generation to retire from office.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, put the Soviet Union at risk of collapsing altogether. In this environment, the Soviet tendency to merge espionage and sabotage into a single mission came to the fore, strengthening practices Soviet intelligence and state security services had implemented from the beginning of the Soviet era. Soviet intelligence activities were divided into two lines: intelligence and diversion. Initially, the intelligence directorate, led during World War II by Pavel Fitin, was responsible for collecting intelligence about Germany and its allies. The diversionary directorate, led by Pavel Sudoplatov, dispatched "intelligence sabotage" teams behind German lines to disrupt Germany's supply lines, command and control, and rear areas and to assassinate German officers. According to Fitin, the intelligence directorate supplied intelligence for the diversionary directorate, and officers were regularly exchanged between the two. This crossover between intelligence and sabotage operations is a continuing characteristic of Russian intelligence services today.

The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue its own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statues themselves stoked confusion. The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the "six deadly adjectives": obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting—lawmakers kept adding words when they updated the law. Multiplying the number of adjectives was a way of papering over the elusiveness of any given designation. What was the difference between obscene and lascivious? If a judge seemed reluctant to find something lewd, a prosecutor could argue that it was disgusting—and every one of those adjectives was subjective.

When his birthday came soon after the party, she sent a decorated box of balloons to his office at MPath, and Max was moved nearly to tears by the gesture.

We’re taking Jayneen over with us,” Clip said. “I’m betting the Professor will help us out once he gets a chance to talk to her.” “You’re just using me,” Jayneen observed dryly. “It happens,” said Warrant Officer Saratileentrop icily, looking at Staff Sergeant Jontilictick. She looked back down, observing her station.

Workplace AI will not only hire and fire us, but guide our daily performance, correct us when we slip up, and praise us when we do good work. “Playing office politics” will come to mean “reverse-engineering a piece of workforce management software.” A “hostile work environment” might be the result of a poorly trained machine learning model rather than an abusive boss.

the lab’s essential public health functions could be compromised during the move and if the lab had fewer employees. The lab, now at a former Devon Energy Corp. field office building next to a cow pasture in Stillwater, has struggled to keep its top director and other key employees. Delays to get test results for basic public health surveillance for salmonella outbreaks and sexually transmitted infections have shaken the confidence of lab partners and local public health officials. As a new coronavirus emerges going into winter, the lab ranks last in the nation for COVID-19 variant testing. Many employees, who found out about the lab’s move from an October 2020 press conference, didn’t want to relocate to Stillwater. Those who did make the move in the first few months of 2021 found expensive lab equipment in their new workplace but not enough electrical outlets for them. The lab’s internet connection was slower than expected and not part of the ultra-fast fiber network used across town by Oklahoma State University. A fridge containing reagents, among the basic supplies for any lab, had to be thrown out after a power outage. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized a correction plan after federal inspectors, prompted by an anonymous complaint, showed up unannounced at the lab in late September. “Although some aspects of the original report were not as favorable as we would have liked, the path of correction is clear and more than attainable,” Secretary of Health and Mental Health Kevin Corbett said Tuesday in a statement about the inspection. “We are well on our way to fully implementing our plan. (The Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services) has confirmed we’ve met the requirements of being in compliance. We are looking forward to their follow-up visit.” In an earlier statement, the health department said the Stillwater lab now “has sufficient power outlets to perform testing with the new equipment, and has fiber connection that exceeds what is necessary to properly run genetic sequencing and other lab functions.” The department denied the lab had to throw out the reagents after a power outage.

If she happened to pass this initial hurdle, the real test would begin. Her Asian girlfriends all knew this test. They called it the “SATs.” The Asian male would begin a not so covert interrogation focused on the Asian female’s social, academic, and talent aptitudes in order to determine whether she was possible “wife and bearer of my sons” material. This happened while the Asian male not so subtly flaunted his own SAT stats—how many generations his family had been in America; what kind of doctors his parents were; how many musical instruments he played; the number of tennis camps he went to; which Ivy League scholarships he turned down; what model BMW, Audi, or Lexus he drove; and the approximate number of years before he became (pick one) chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief law partner, or chief surgeon.

These are brainwashing exercises,” says former CIA officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp. “Getting all of these thousands of public health and law enforcement officials to participate in blowing up the US Bill of Rights in these exercises, you basically have obtained their prior sign-off on torpedoing the Constitution to overthrow its democracy. They know that none of these participants are going to suddenly start soul-searching when the real thing happens. The CIA has spent decades studying exactly how to control large populations using these sorts of techniques.” Shipp adds: “We are all subjects now being manipulated in a vast population-wide Milgram experiment, with Dr. Fauci playing the doctor in the white lab coat instructing us to ignore our virtues and our conscience and obliterate the Constitution.

And,” Buster continued, finding that he could not stop talking about it now that he had started, “there was this table with food laid out for all the people on set and these naked guys would be standing over the table, constructing these sad little sandwiches and eating handfuls of M&Ms.” “Jesus Christ,” said David, shaking his head. “And then you had to write about it, which I bet sucked,” Joseph said. “Yeah,” Buster said, pleased that Joseph understood the strangeness of writing about things you despise, “and so I wrote this bizarre article about how Hester Bangs wasn’t an actress, wasn’t even a porn star, that she was more like a professional athlete. She was like a marathoner, and that, as disturbing as it was to witness, I had so much admiration for her ability to do it.” Kenny nodded in agreement. “That sounds like a good article.” “Well,” Buster finished, “three weeks after it comes out, some other porn star breaks the record by more than two hundred guys.” Everyone in the car laughed so loudly that they almost didn’t hear the policeman tapping on the window. As soon as he saw the cop, Buster had the overwhelming feeling that he needed to hide his contraband, the small detail being that he had nothing illegal on his person. Kenny rolled down the window and the officer ducked his head inside the car. “Parked on the side of the road, boys,” he said, “not a smart idea.

Aubrey Davis, officer, Protective Service Unit, Defense Protective Service, Pentagon: The secretary came out the door and asked what was going on. I told him we were getting a report that an aircraft had hit the Mall side of the building. He looked at me and immediately went toward the Mall. I said, “Sir, do you understand, that’s the area of impact, the Mall.” He kept going, so I told Officer [Gilbert] Oldach to come on. I saw Mr. Kisling, Joe Wassel, and Kevin Brown sitting in the personnel security office, and I waved for them to come with us. Donald Rumsfeld: I went out to see what was amiss.

Kevin M. Cecil is a lifelong Sacramento resident with a lifelong commitment to serving the community. With experience in a variety of legal areas & settings, including criminal defense, personal injury, divorce, divorce / family law, & civil litigation, Mr. Cecil chose to concentrate on family law. He has assisted clients in many areas of family law, including guardianships, dependency actions & domestic violence restraining orders.

Greater than the president is the office of the president and whosoever brings disrepute to this office, brings the country to disrepute.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

An office full of software engineers soon morphed, under the flickering fluorescent lights, into a tribe of chattering primates. All-hands meetings, shared meals, and team outings became elaborate social grooming sessions. Interviews began to look like thinly veiled initiation rituals. The company logo took on the character of a tribal totem or religious symbol.

Movie stars didn’t become irrelevant, but they became very inconsistent in attracting an audience. People used to go to almost any movie with Tom Cruise in it. Between 1992 and 2006, Cruise starred in twelve films that each grossed more than $100 million domestically. He was on an unparalleled streak, with virtually no flops. But in the decade since then, five of Cruise’s nine movies—Knight and Day, Rock of Ages, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Mummy—were box-office disappointments. This was an increasingly common occurrence for A-listers. Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller couldn’t convince anyone to see Zoolander 2. Brad Pitt didn’t attract audiences to Allied. Virtually nobody wanted to see Sandra Bullock in Our Brand Is Crisis. It’s not that they were being replaced by a new generation of stars. Certainly Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt and Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy have risen in popularity in recent years, but outside of major franchises like The Hunger Games and Jurassic World, their box-office records are inconsistent as well. What happened? Audiences’ loyalties shifted. Not to other stars, but to franchises. Today, no person has the box-office track record that Cruise once did, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will again. But Marvel Studios does. Harry Potter does. Fast & Furious does. Moviegoers looking for the consistent, predictable satisfaction they used to get from their favorite stars now turn to cinematic universes. Any movie with “Jurassic” in the title is sure to feature family-friendly adventures on an island full of dinosaurs, no matter who plays the human roles. Star vehicles are less predictable because stars themselves get older, they make idiosyncratic choices, and thanks to the tabloid media, our knowledge of their personal failings often colors how we view them onscreen (one reason for Cruise’s box-office woes has been that many women turned on him following his failed marriage to Katie Holmes).

made the decision to split Marvel’s movie-making unit off from the rest of Marvel and bring it under Alan Horn and the Walt Disney Studios. Kevin would now report directly to Alan, and would benefit from his experience, and the tensions that had built up between him and the New York office would be alleviated.

As the losses mounted, underprivileged children treated to free seats in the Bull Ring, a section of left-field seats named for Greg “the Bull” Luzinski, booed Luzinski. Ozark took to sitting in his office with the door locked.

She walked back into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink. She picked up the phone and dialed Sally’s office number, relieved to be shuttled to her voice mail. “Sally,” she said, walking, as always, straight into the sun, “I think I fucked you over again.” the portrait of a lady, 1988 artists: caleb and camille fang None of the Fangs could deny it: Buster was beautiful.