Largest Collection Of Quotes

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Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.
John Green (Paper Towns)
I have a hobby. I have the world’s largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen some of it.
Steven Wright
IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.
John Green
Here at great expense,' [Colonel Groves] moaned to Oppenheimer, 'the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots.
Steve Sheinkin (Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon)
Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms: * Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives. * Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. * Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. * Do not put statements in the negative form. * Verbs has to agree with their subjects. * No sentence fragments. * Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. * Avoid commas, that are not necessary. * If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. * A writer must not shift your point of view. * Eschew dialect, irregardless. * And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. * Don't overuse exclamation marks!!! * Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. * Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens. * Write all adverbial forms correct. * Don't use contractions in formal writing. * Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. * It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. * If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. * Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. * Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors. * Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. * Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. * Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. * If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. * Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. * Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. * Always pick on the correct idiom. * "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" * The adverb always follows the verb. * Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives." (New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)
William Safire (Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage)
Mrs. Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
Alberta's two largest cities collected more in library fines than two higher levels of government levied against polluters in 2006-2007.
Gordon Laird (The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization)
His professional expertise—before defecting to South Korea in 2003—was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea. And it funneled most of the money to the Dear Leader.
Blaine Harden (Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West)
On my recent trip to Washington DC, I wore a hat I made out of a tin funnel that I covered with fur. Why? Because I was going to where the world’s largest collection of morons were, so I figured I’d fit right in if I looked like an idiot.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
In fact, if a museum were filled with all of the world's stolen artworks, it would be the most impressive collection ever created. It would have far more Baroque sculptures, much better Surrealist paintings, and the best Greek antiquities of any known institution. A gallery of stolen art would make the Louvre seem like a small-town gallery in comparison. Experts call it the Lost Museum.
Ulrich Boser (The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft)
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly. Grandpa wanted to do his part too.
Kara Martinelli (My Very Dearest Anna)
Next door to the Bensons is Emmet Frag, a retired pacemaker who is credited with inventing the notion of happiness. He’s currently working on a method for categorising ducks based on their singing voice. He’s also the owner of the world’s largest collection of tenor geese.
St. John Morris (The Bizarre Letters of St John Morris)
The guru said: If you want to genuinely practice the Dharma, do what is virtuous, even the most minute deed. Renounce what is evil, even the tiniest deed. The largest ocean is made from drops of water; even Mount Sumeru and the four continents are made of tiny atoms. (p. 30)
Padmasambhava (Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples)
Grandpa Tommy hitched the horses after supper and readied them to ride into the town of South Boston—home of the nation’s second-largest tobacco market, with tobacco parades, a Miss Tobacco pageant, and a port where boats collected the dried leaves for people around the world to smoke.
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
The founders of start-ups as varied as YouTube, Palantir Technologies, and Yelp all worked at PayPal. Another set of people—including Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and Botha—emerged as some of the technology industry’s top investors. PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation’s greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America’s welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line?
Victor Davis Hanson (The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction (Victor Davis Hanson Collection Book 2))
The largest dahlia in her mother’s collection was called the Dauntless, a bright red flower shaped like a pom-pom and the size of a dinner plate.
Leslye Walton (The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender)
Hef holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for largest scrapbook collection at over 2,000 volumes.
Holly Madison (Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny)
Choice was an illusion. Seeing that a man can never really get out of jail, the great thing is to ensure that he gets into the biggest possible one with the largest possible range of modern amenities.
Frank O'Connor (Collected Stories)
A collection of Russian matryoshka dolls painted brightly in red and blue peeked out at me expectantly from one of the shelves. I couldn’t resist opening one, revealing a smaller doll inside. I opened that too, on and on until I had five dolls, each decreasing in size, all made to perfectly fit inside the largest one. It was exactly how I felt: a fully formed woman, but the little girl inside was still there.
Evie Woods (The Lost Bookshop)
Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
In our cultural collective imagination, the food safety threat that looms largest is botulism, the rare but often deadly neurological disease caused by botulinum, “the most poisonous substance known to humans,”2 a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Early
Sandor Ellix Katz (The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World)
Climate change poses threats that are probabilistic, multiple, indirect, often invisible, and unbounded in space and time. Fully grasping these threats requires scientific understanding and technical skills that are often in short supply. Moreover, climate change can be seen as presenting us with the largest collective action problem that humanity has ever faced, one that has both intra- and inter-generational dimensions. Evolution did not design us to deal with such problems, and we have not designed political institutions that are conducive to solving them.
Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
What is the difference between a squirrel burying acorns across the forest and humans planting potatoes across the globe? Who is master, and who is the servant? Is it the acorn's or potato's idea to be nutritious, or the creature that buries them? Evolution is not about design or will; it is the outcome of constant endeavors made by organisms that want to survive and better themselves. The collective result is intoxicatingly beautiful, rife with oddities, and surprisingly brilliant, yet no agent is in control. Evolution arises from the bottom up--so, too, does hope.
Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming)
Cassie Wright's largest audience, the only part of her audience still growing, is composed of sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-old men. These men buy her backlist movies, her plastic breast relics and pocket vaginas, but not for any erotic purpose. They collect the blow-up sex surrogates and signature lingerie as some form of religious relics. Souvenirs of the real mother, the perfect mother they never had. Frankenstein parts or religious totems of the mother they'll spend the rest of their lives trying to find -who'll praise them enough, support them enough, love them enough.
Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)
The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpations, but by the actions of the individual. The strongest city, the largest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person. In that dire moment of uncertainty, that person’s decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.
Jim Butcher (Furies of Calderon (Codex Alera, #1))
Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance—i.e., cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. The second most important factor was the social intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their ability to read each other’s social signals. Women tend to do better at reading social signals, so groups with more women tended to do better (see the Social Signals Special Topic Box [at the end of Chapter 7]).
Alex Pentland (Social Physics: how good ideas spread — the lessons from a new science)
The measuring rod, the unit of information, is something called a bit (for binary digit). It is an answer - either yes or no- to an unambiguous question... The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons- about a hundred trillion, 10^14 bits. If written out in English, say, that information would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world's largest libraries. The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the heads of every one of us... When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library... The great libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, the equivalent of about 10^14 bits of information in words, and perhaps 10^15 bits in pictures. This is ten thousand times more than in our brains. If I finish a book a week, I will only read a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read... Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. p224-233
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
Where would tourism be without a little luxury and a taste of night life? There were several cities on Deanna, all moderate in size, but the largest was the capital, Atro City. For the connoisseur of fast-foods, Albrechts’ famous hotdogs and coldcats were sold fresh from his stall (Albrecht’s Takeaways) on Lupini Square. For the sake of his own mental health he had temporarily removed Hot Stuff Blend from the menu. The city was home to Atro City University, which taught everything from algebra and make-up application to advanced stamp collecting; and it was also home to the planet-famous bounty hunter – Beck the Badfeller. Beck was a legend in his own lifetime. If Deanna had any folklore, then Beck the Badfeller was one of its main features. He was the local version of Robin Hood, the Davy Crockett of Deanna. The Local rumor mill had it he was so good he could find the missing day in a leap year. Once, so the story goes, he even found a missing sock.
Christina Engela (Loderunner)
The wardrobe threw open her doors. Inside were a few interesting things- one of the largest, clearest mirrors Belle had ever seen, some moths, and an extremely pretty collection of gowns that would have made the blond triplets, Paulette, Claudette, and Laurette, swoon. Belle examined the dresses skeptically. Of course, if things went the way they did in fairy tales, they would all fit her perfectly. The question was, was this a "Bluebeard's Wives" situation? Or something else?
Liz Braswell (As Old as Time)
Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced. This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science. Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
In the world of physical matter, whether one is looking at the largest star that floats through the heavens or the smallest grain of sand to be found on earth, the object under observation is but an organized collection of molecules, atoms and electrons revolving around one another at inconceivable speed. Every particle of physical matter is in a continuous state of highly agitated motion. Nothing is ever still, although nearly all physical matter may appear, to the physical eye, to be motionless. There is no "solid" physical matter.
Napoleon Hill (THE LAW OF SUCCESS. The Complete 16 lessons, based on the original 1928 edition. (Timeless Wisdom Collection))
In 1994 very, very few people had heard of the internet. It was used at that time mostly by scientists and physicists. We used it a little bit at D. E. Shaw for some things but not much, and I came across the fact that the web—the World Wide Web—was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if it’s baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big. I concluded that I should come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it and keep working to improve it. So I made a list of products I might sell online. I started ranking them, and I picked books because books are super unusual in one respect: there are more items in the book category than in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. The biggest bookstores had only 150,000 titles. So the founding idea of Amazon was to build a universal selection of books in print. That’s what I did: I hired a small team, and we built the software. I moved to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world at that time was nearby in a town called Roseberg, Oregon, and also because of the recruiting pool available from Microsoft.
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’. More moderate and more successful experiments were made on other occasions, for example in the Inca Empire. Yet most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they developed money.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
...Most peasants never traveled farther than twenty-five miles from the village of their birth. They had strong social ties to their communities, and could not imagine living anywhere else. "In many places, peasant villages were located within a noble's estate, which was called a manor. Manors could be as small as one hundred acres or as large as several thousand acres and typically encompassed a mixture of cultivated and uncultivated land. Forests provided wood, nuts, and berries; pastures and meadows offered grazing for livestock; and lakes and rivers gave water and fish. But the largest acreage was devoted to agriculture, apportioned among the peasants and the noble, although the noble did no farming himself. Instead the peasants collectively worked both his land and theirs.
Patricia D. Netzley (Life During Renaissance (The Way People Lived))
Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which they had been supporting hitherto.
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
For a patrimonial state to be stable over time, it is best ruled with consent, at least with consent from the largest minority, if not from the majority. Instinctive obedience must be the norm, otherwise too much effort needs to be put into suppressing disaffection for the regime's wider aims to be achievable. Consent is, however, not always easy to obtain. The collective view of most societies is rather conservative: in the main people prefer to see the social arrangements of their youth perpetuated into their old age; they prefer that things be done in the time-honoured way; they are suspicious of novelty and resistant to change. Thus when radical action must be taken, for whatever reason, a great burden falls on the ruler, the father-figure, who has to overcome this social inertia and persuade his subjects to follow his lead. In order that his will shall prevail, he needs to generate huge respect, preferably adulation, and if at all possible sheer awe among his people.
Paul Kriwaczek (Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization)
In four years of struggle, this Volk faced off twenty-six states and was only vanquished by betrayal and dishonesty! Had there not been Germans back then to undermine trust in their own regime, England and France would never have won! Had then [in 1918] a certain Adolf Hitler, instead of serving as a German musketeer, been German Reich Chancellor, do you really believe that then the false gods of capitalism and international democracy would have carried the victory?! When I conjure up all these so-called international statesmen in the democracies, who today talk big in Europe, before my mind’s eye and envision their lives’ achievements, then all I can say is: At home and abroad, I have always had the misfortune of fighting against zeroes. These folk rule over the largest of terrains on this earth and yet are not even capable of eliminating unemployment in their own countries. And these folk speak of the necessity of a new order for Europe. That reminds me of the talk of our own democrats of earlier days who preached the necessity of a new order for Germany. This new order was indeed established-although without them. And a new order will be established in the world-although equally without them! My struggle for the liberty of our Volk was a struggle against Versailles. Speech for the 20-th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. in the Hofbräuhaus Munich, February 24, 1940
Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. There searchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant” or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan,2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%." Lonsway, Kimberly A., Joanne Archambault, and David Lisak. "False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault." The Voice 3.1 (2009): 1-11.
David Lisak
In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecom providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk—regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
Glenn Greenwald (No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State)
Now the nation’s largest billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor Inc., is bringing customized pop-up ads to the interstate. Its Radar program, up and running in Boston and 10 other US cities, uses data AT&T Inc. collects on 130 million cellular subscribers, and from two other companies, PlaceIQ Inc. and Placed Inc., which use phone apps to track the comings and goings of millions more. Clear Channel knows what kinds of people are driving past one of their billboards at 6:30 p.m. on a Friday—how many are Dunkin’ Donuts regulars, for example, or have been to three Red Sox games so far this year. It can then precisely target ads to them.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Trading posts turned into forts, forts into tribute-collecting points, and tribute-collecting points, by the end of the tenth century, into the largest kingdom in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians.
Anna Reid (Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine)
In ten days,” I said, “the United States will have elected its first woman president. The question at that moment will be whether the hate and division that surfaced during the 2016 campaign will be remembered as a last gasp of a defeated populace, clinging desperately to the old order they once ruled as it was swept away, or the beginning of a recalcitrant movement against American democratic pluralism.” Most members of the audience applauded with the same smug certainty that I was showing. One man, though, with a strong Central European accent, stooped over a cane, spoke to me afterward. “I have seen movements like this before,” he told me.”They are not so easily dismissed.” Like so many other members of the Washington cognoscenti, I had been dead wrong. I could justify it. Oh, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million; her 2 percent win was the largest of any losing presidential candidate since the disputed election of 1876. Had it not been for the Russians, or James Comey, or Anthony Weiner, or Jill Stein, surely she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which she lost collectively by a smaller number than a capacity crowd at Lambeau Field. Perhaps all true, but I was wrong nonetheless. And since that miscalculation, the troubles have grown for Jews, leaping from the abstraction of the Internet to the reality of toppled headstones at Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia, swastikas as graffiti, and bomb threats against synagogues and Jewish community centers, daycare facilities, and schools.
Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
1State Library of VictoriaLIBRARY MAP GOOGLE MAP This grand neoclassical building has been at the forefront of Melbourne's literary scene since it opened in 1856. When its epicentre, the gorgeous octagonal La Trobe Reading Room, was completed in 1913, its reinforced-concrete dome was the largest of its kind in the world; its natural light illuminates the ornate plasterwork and the studious Melbourne writers who come here to pen their works. For visitors, the highlight is the fascinating collection showcased in the Dome Galleries.
Lonely Planet (Lonely Planet Pocket Melbourne (Travel Guide))
If you had an Internet connection and lived in North America at the time, you may have seen it. Vasquez is the man behind the “Double Rainbow” video, which at last check had 38 million views. In the clip, Vasquez pans his camera back and forth to show twin rainbows he’d discovered outside his house, first whispering in awe, then escalating in volume and emotion as he’s swept away in the moment. He hoots with delight, monologues about the rainbows’ beauty, sobs, and eventually waxes existential. “What does it mean?” Vasquez crows into the camera toward the end of the clip, voice filled with tears of sheer joy, marveling at rainbows like no man ever has or probably ever will again. It’s hard to watch without cracking up. That same month, the viral blog BuzzFeed boosted a different YouTuber’s visibility. Michelle Phan, a 23-year-old Vietnamese American makeup artist, posted a home video tutorial about how to apply makeup to re-create music star Lady Gaga’s look from the recently popular music video “Bad Romance.” BuzzFeed gushed, its followers shared, and Lady Gaga’s massive fanbase caught wind of the young Asian girl who taught you how to transform into Gaga. Once again, the Internet took the video and ran with it. Phan’s clip eventually clocked in at roughly the same number of views as “Double Rainbow.” These two YouTube sensations shared a spotlight in the same summer. Tens of millions of people watched them, because of a couple of superconnectors. So where are Vasquez and Phan now? Bear Vasquez has posted more than 1,300 videos now, inspired by the runaway success of “Double Rainbow.” But most of them have been completely ignored. After Kimmel and the subsequent media flurry, Vasquez spent the next few years trying to recapture the magic—and inadvertent comedy—of that moment. But his monologues about wild turkeys or clips of himself swimming in lakes just don’t seem to find their way to the chuckling masses like “Double Rainbow” did. He sells “Double Rainbow” T-shirts. And wears them. Today, Michelle Phan is widely considered the cosmetic queen of the Internet, and is the second-most-watched female YouTuber in the world. Her videos have a collective 800 million views. She amassed 5 million YouTube subscribers, and became the official video makeup artist for Lancôme, one of the largest cosmetics brands in the world. Phan has since founded the beauty-sample delivery company Ipsy.com, which has more than 150,000 paying subscribers, and created her own line of Sephora cosmetics. She continues to run her video business—now a full-blown production company—which has brought in millions of dollars from advertising. She’s shot to the top of a hypercompetitive industry at an improbably young age. And she’s still climbing. Bear Vasquez is still cheerful. But he’s not been able to capitalize on his one-time success. Michelle Phan could be the next Estée Lauder. This chapter is about what she did differently.
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind fits right in among St. Augustine’s stately bearded oaks and rock coral walls, looking more like a college campus than anything else. It’s the largest facility of its kind in the world. Because stomping on cement hurts, deaf students cup one hand against the wall and bark a short hoh to get each other’s attention from a distance. The sound echoes up and down the halls and kids stop to see if it’s them being hailed. Deaf couples stretch the boy’s T-shirt forward, dip their faces into the neck, and sign inside for privacy. Their faces almost touch. Fabric ripples with hidden movements. Watching them, my inner adolescent feels a twinge of jealousy.
Aaron Curtis (World Book Night 2014 ebook: An Original Collection of Stories and Essays by Booksellers, Librarians, and Authors)
In Florida we got to hang out with some of America’s finest at Eglin Air Force Base. The army Rangers there had been clearing a section of bush for doing operations and had encountered a huge eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Diamondbacks grow to be the largest rattlers anyway, but this one was big for another reason: She was pregnant. Not long after the Rangers’ reptile handlers had transported her back to a holding facility, she gave birth. We watched as the newborn rattlers worked their way out, lay still for a short moment, and then immediately began striking at everything and anything nearby. Although it was a great defense mechanism, in case a predator was about to eat them, it appeared pretty comical. Bite, bite, bite, strike, strike, strike. Then they would curl up and hide for a while. Soon enough it was back on the offensive: bite, strike, bite. They were all fang, and trying to look tough. An interesting way to greet the world. Steve and I scooped up the baby rattlesnakes and held them until they went through their strike phase. We made sure to set them down before they went back to their frenzied biting. “What happens if you’re bitten by a venomous snake while you are breastfeeding?” Steve asked. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’d probably have to stop breastfeeding, right?” “Just be sure not to get bitten,” Steve said. “Deal,” I said. I scooped up a little wet rattler, talked to the camera, then set the snake back down. Boing, boing, boing went the baby rattler, jumping madly around, trying to bite everything. Even the Rangers laughed. Once the Rangers had completed their training mission, all the dangerous wildlife they collected (including the rattlers) would go right back where they came from. We were very proud to have worked with some of America’s heroes.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
When he had made all the necessary preparations the army began to embark at the approach of the dawn; while according to custom he offered sacrifice to the gods and to the river Hydaspes, as the prophets directed. When he had embarked he poured a libation into the river from the prow of the ship out of a golden goblet, invoking the Acesines as well as the Hydaspes, because he had ascertained that it is the largest of all the rivers which unite with the Hydaspes, and that their confluence was not far off. He also invoked the Indus, into which the Acesines flows after its junction with the Hydaspes. Moreover he poured out libations to his forefather Heracles, to Ammon, and the other gods to whom he was in the habit of sacrificing, and then he ordered the signal for starting seawards to be given with the trumpet. As soon as the signal was given they commenced the voyage in regular order; for directions had been given at what distance apart it was necessary for the baggage vessels to be arranged, as also for the vessels conveying the horses and for the ships of war; so that they might not fall foul of each other by sailing down the channel at random. He did not allow even the fast-sailing ships to get out of rank by outstripping the rest. The noise of the rowing was never equalled on any other occasion, inasmuch as it proceeded from so many ships rowed at the same time; also the shouting of the boatswains giving the time for beginning and stopping the stroke of the oars, and the clamour of the rowers, when keeping time all together with the dashing of the oars, made a noise like a battle-cry. The banks of the river also, being in many places higher than the ships, and collecting the sound into a narrow space, sent back to each other an echo which was very much increased by its very compression. In some parts too the groves of trees on each side of the river helped to swell the sound, both from the solitude and the reverberation of the noise. The horses which were visible on the decks of the transports struck the barbarians who saw them with such surprise that those of them who were present at the starting of the fleet accompanied it a long way from the place of embarkation. For horses had never before been seen on board ships in the country of India; and the natives did not call to mind that the expedition of Dionysus into India was a naval one. The shouting of the rowers and the noise of the rowing were heard by the Indians who had already submitted to Alexander, and these came running down to the river’s bank and accompanied him singing their native songs. For the Indians have been eminently fond of singing and dancing since the time of Dionysus and those who under his bacchic inspiration traversed the land of the Indians with him.
Arrian (The Campaigns of Alexander)
As of early 2017, GiveDirectly planned to mobilize $30 million for what it claims will be the largest basic income experiment ever. Continuing with the RCT methodology, villages in two Kenyan counties will be divided into three groups: in forty villages all adult residents will receive a monthly basic income for twelve years; in eighty villages all adult residents will receive a basic income for two years; and in another eighty villages all adult residents will receive a lump sum equivalent to the two-year basic income. In all, some 26,000 individuals will receive cash transfers worth about 75 US cents a day. Data will also be collected from a control group of a hundred similar villages. The stated main objective of GiveDirectly is the eradication of ‘extreme poverty’, which is a worthy goal but is not the prime rationale for a basic income system. At the time of writing, the hypotheses to be tested had not been finalized, though one aim of the proposed study is to look at the impact of a long-term basic income on risk-taking, such as starting a business, and another is to look at village-level economic effects. The sheer size of the planned experiments may backfire by distorting the social and economic context. The project has already run into problems of low participation rates in one county, where people have refused the no-strings largesse, believing it to be linked to cults or devil worship. That said, unlike the pilots proposed in Europe, this experiment will test a genuine basic income by providing a universal, unconditional income paid to all individuals in a community. So the hope must be that the researchers, advised by well-known economists from prestigious US universities, will ask the right questions.
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
Seated in the middle of the floor with its back to me was the naked figure of a baby of, perhaps, two years, prattling wordlessly in its sing-song treble as it played with a pile of gleaming white objects arranged about it in a circle. One of these, a globular thing of peculiar configuration, it grasped in its right hand, and banged down noisily among the rest. Opposite, just discernible in the shadowy corner, sat the largest brindled cat I had ever seen, dreamily watching the play through half closed, flame-yellow eyes. I suppose it must have been many minutes that I stood there dumbfounded, staring at this incredible spectacle, before my dazed senses registered its full hideousness, and then a strangled gasp escaped me, for I saw that the toy in the child’s hand was a tiny human skull and that all the other white things were the various bones of an infant skeleton!
L.A. Lewis (Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales)
Hoping to create a little prestige, some retailers develop and advertise premium clothes sub-brands. In 2006, Myer, one of Australia’s largest retailers, launched a fashion line by top designer Wayne Cooper, known as ‘Wayne by Wayne Cooper Collection’. In 2010, Tesco launched a high-end fashion range, F&F, following Asda, who have created the most successful retail clothing sub-brand, George, by well-known British designer George Davies, which is worth $1.6 billion and is being rolled out in Wal-Marts across North America.
Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
On June 8, 1946, Britain staged an elaborate victory parade, inviting armed forces from more than thirty Allied nations to London in a joyous celebration of their collective efforts. Czechs and Norwegians marched down the mall that day, as did Chinese and Dutch, Frenchmen and Iranians, Belgians and Australians, Canadians and South Africans, Sikhs and Arabs, and many, many more. However, the Poles - the fourth largest contributor of manpower to the Allied effort in Europe- were nowhere to be seen. They had been deliberately and specifically barred by the government, for fear of offending Stalin.
Lynne Olson (Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War)
Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.9 The OCLC partnership has reduced the need for every library to create its own catalog record for every book or item it collects, creating enormous efficiencies. OCLC’s WorldCat system, for instance, allows anyone with web access to search across the catalogs of a large number of libraries to locate books wherever they are in the country. WorldCat is simple, but it has proved that implementing even the simplest of systems can be remarkably useful to library patrons.
John Palfrey (BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google)
Boardsi provides a web-based network which connects companies with the right executives to suit its needs. The process of creating a board becomes seamless and efficient instead of laborious. Boardsi’s CEO and Co-Founder, Martin Rowinski was listed among the 10 Best CEOs to Watch in 2021 by DotCom Magazine. The company prides itself on providing the largest curated collection of compensated board work in the world to its executive candidates.
Boardsi
The youngest layer of the Yajur Veda Text includes the largest collection of primary Upanishadas. These include the Brihadaranya Upanishada, the Isha Upanishada, the Taittriya Upanishada, the Katha Upanishada and Maitriya Upanishada.
Ram Nivas Kumar (MANUSMRITI THE GREATEST KNOWLEDGE: Code Of Social Conduct)
Now he embarked on a buying spree that would eventually produce the world’s largest art collection in private hands.
Ron Chernow (The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance)
The largest number of victims of jihadist violence are Muslims themselves within their own countries.
Kim Ghattas (Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East)
so it is the editor’s job to propose alternate scenarios as bait to encourage the sleeping dream to rise to its defense and thus reveal itself more fully. And these scenarios unfold themselves at the largest level (should such-and-such a scene be removed from the film for the good of the whole?) and at the most detailed (should this shot end on this frame or 1/24th of a second later on the next frame?). But sometimes it is the editor who is the dreamer and the director who is the listener, and it is he who now offers the bait to tempt the collective dream to reveal more of itself. As any fisherman can tell you, it is the quality of the bait that determines the kind of fish you catch.
Walter Murch (In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing)
Our solar system, in turn, is just one tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, that thick band of stars visible in the darkest night skies stretching far over our heads. We’re about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the rotating galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars—and at least that number of planets—and stretches across some 87,400 light-years. What we see in our skies from Earth is the equivalent of staring at the side of the Milky Way stretching off before us, as if we’re looking at the edge of a plate or a Frisbee. It is spiral-shaped, like an enormous spinning pinwheel, first mentioned, as far as we know, by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in AD 964, recorded in his The Book of the Fixed Stars. In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to piece together, using a telescope, that the Milky Way visible in our skies was a collection of faint stars; a century later, Immanuel Kant surmised that it was a rotating body of stars, and over the next two hundred years, astronomers came to begin to grasp how enormous the universe truly is. Now we understand that our Milky Way is about 2.5 million light-years from the next closest galaxy, known as Andromeda. Together, these two massive galaxies—and all the stuff in between them, including a number of so-called dwarf galaxies and satellite galaxies, as well as a third large galaxy known as Triangulum—make up what astronomers call the “Local Group,” which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a “supercluster.”II For most of the last fifty years, our particular galactic neighborhood was believed to be part of the “Virgo Supercluster,” a gathering of about one hundred galaxies, but in 2014 a team of astronomers led by Hawaii’s R. Brent Tully realized we were more connected to our neighbors than anyone had realized; they redrew the boundaries of the galactic map after realizing that our supercluster was far more vast and in fact consisted of what had been four separate superclusters that all moved in the same gravitational rhythm. They dubbed the new supercluster “Laniakea,” Hawaiian for “immense heaven,” and we now believe it encompasses about one hundred thousand other galaxies that astronomers define as “nearby,” despite the fact that they stretch across more than 520 million light-years of outer space. Laniakea, in turn, is now understood to be part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, an enormous structure of about sixty superclusters that together stretch across a billion light-years. The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex is what’s known as a “galaxy filament,” the largest structures known to exist in our universe, in which NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies stretching across 46 billion light-years.III (Each of those galaxies is estimated to have perhaps 100 million stars—although the largest, known as supergiants, can contain 100 trillion.)
Garrett M. Graff (UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There)
No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax. My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results. I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. —Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306
James A. Michener (The World Is My Home: A Memoir)
Kansas to Indianapolis, stopping in Casey, Illinois, to visit the world’s largest collection of world’s largest objects.
Miranda July (All Fours)
Married? You Can Get Maximum Spousal and Retirement Benefits If your husband (wife) files for their retirement benefit (regardless of whether they suspend it), you can, after reaching FRA, file just for a full spousal benefit (half of your spouse’s full retirement benefit) and then wait until 70 to collect your largest possible retirement benefit.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff (Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security (The Get What's Yours Series))
In its quest to organize the world’s information, Google has scoured vast troves of data to amass the greatest accumulation of information assets on the planet, including the billions of search queries on google.com and YouTube and the billions of interactions on Android, the dominant operating system for most mobile devices. Google also controls an ever-growing index of the world’s websites and the browsing history of more than 2 billion users, three types of maps of the Earth’s surface and traffic patterns, a real-time list of trending topics, the largest archive of discussions in Usenet groups, the entire contents of 20 million books, a huge collection of photographs, the largest collection of video on the planet, the largest online email repository, even the largest archive of DNA data.
Robert Tercek (Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World)
Bagan, Myanmar On the banks of the Ayeyarwady River in Central Myanmar lies the truly extraordinary area of Bagan. It is home to the largest collection of Buddhist pagodas, temples and ruins anywhere in the world. Some of the structures are almost 1000 years. Although none are as impressive as those at Angkor, the sheer number is what is remarkable. The town itself is a fairly laid back affair. If you're an early riser you might just catch some of the rituals that the monks and monkettes (yes there are female monks, shaved head and all) go through each morning or even a novice monk initiation ceremony.
Funky Guides (Backpackers Guide to Southeast Asia 2014-2015)
According to the local historians, Mrs. Cottonwood invested the money in diamonds and sapphires. The largest piece in the collection was a necklace called The Seven Sisters. It was seven sapphires, with two diamonds, set in the swirling formation of the stars.
M.L. Bullock (Seven Sisters (Seven Sisters #1))
Human beings have the largest impact on the overall health of the planet, and therefore we should be more responsible with how we live our lives. All of the tragedies that we are experiencing today can be linked back to the actions of human beings.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
The body’s fat tissue, also known as fat mass, is actually the endocrine system’s largest organ. Fat plays an enormously important role in regulating metabolism and influencing inflammation responses throughout the body. Collectively, the fat mass produces and secretes more hormones and bioactive chemicals, called adipocytokines, than any other endocrine gland.
Emily Cooper (The Metabolic Storm: The science of your metabolism and why it's making you FAT and possibly INFERTILE)
Now she volunteered to open an account in her name at Yandex Money, the largest online payment service in Russia, in order to collect donations to support the protests. The organizing committee agreed. With Romanova in charge, it meant that nobody would question where the money went, given her unblemished reputation for integrity. The money would be safe from government pressure too; any attempt to intimidate Romanova would clearly be futile. The account at Yandex Money became known as Romanova’s Purse.11 On December 20 Yandex published on Facebook a new application that facilitated crowdfunding through Facebook for Yandex Money. Previously Yandex Money had become a common way for Moscow’s middle class to carry out e-commerce online; people trusted Yandex with their credit cards and used it to make purchases. Now the crowdsourcing application took it to a new level. Protesters were quickly able to utilize a transparent way to collect money for the demonstrations, and it was all done thanks to Internet technology. Romanova was a fearless overseer. Yandex said it was pure coincidence that the new crowdsourcing app was rolled out at the same time that protesters were raising money for the next rally. The next big protest rally was scheduled for December 24 on Prospect Sakharova. Ilya Klishin renamed the main protest event page on Facebook, with the cover photo depicting a wide image of the Bolotnaya crowd and the slogan, “We Were on Bolotnaya and We Are Coming Back,” and on the side carried a picture with the words, “We Are for Fair Elections.” Organizers announced they needed 3 million rubles, about $100,000. Romanova soon collected more than 4 million rubles online and immediately posted a detailed report of how the money would be spent.
Andrei Soldatov (The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries)
Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low.
James S.A. Corey (Abaddon’s Gate (The Expanse, #3))
What is even more shocking, among the largest receivers of CAP subsidies are some of the most prestigious aristocratic families of Britain, as well as the present owners of the large collective farms privatized after the fall of East Germany’s communist regime. According to a study by professor Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (reported by the International Herald Tribune (Castle 2007) in the 2003–2004 farming year, the Queen of England and Prince Charles received 360,000 euros in EU farm subsidies, the Duke of Westminster 260,000 euros, and the Duke of Marlborough 300,000 euros. Incidentally, the capture by powerful national interests of what was supposed to be the core of a ‘welfare state for farmers’ exemplifies the kind of problems that a European welfare state – advocated by some to correct the alleged neo-liberal bias of the EU – would have to face.
Giandomenico Majone (Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis: Has Integration Gone Too Far?)
When Elizabeth ascended to the throne, however, Dee ascended with her, becoming her astrological and scientific advisor; he was soon considered one of the most learned men in England, and certainly had the largest library—his private collection of manuscripts at Mortlake, which he assembled at high personal cost and from which he generously loaned, was substantially larger than the collections of both Oxford and Cambridge. (To briefly note how much our access to information has increased in the last several centuries, consider that during Dee’s life, Cambridge possessed only 451 books and manuscripts; Oxford, 379. Dee had 2,500 books and 170 manuscripts at Mortlake.)
Jason Louv (The Angelic Reformation: John Dee, Enochian Magick & the Occult Roots of Empire)
PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
According to the Commerce Department, employee pay is down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary figures data in 1929. Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. In
Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it)
Migrants are by temperament restless and ingenious and the United States represents the largest single collection of such individuals in the world today. The aggressive migrant temperament has always been a feature of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute eyewitness of American habits and culture, observed as much when he visited in 1831.
Peter C. Whybrow (American Mania: When More is Not Enough)
Before either men could commence a deliberation over who knew more of the hotel’s history, Coraline injected, “India was writing the last chapters of its saga of independence when The Imperial opened its doors in the 1930s.” She paused before proceeding, “Pandit Nehru, Mahatama Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten met under congenial conditions to discuss the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan on the very ground we stand on. Adding to that, the Nehru family also had a permanent suite within the walls of this ‘Maiden of the East.’” She let out a discreet chuckle that I think only I caught. Both men stared at the female, not knowing how to respond. Before either one of them could opine, she continued, “If only walls could speak. Here indeed is a repository of fascinating anecdotal material for authors of romantic and detective fiction. It was here, at this very site, that one could clink glasses for the Royals to their war efforts, urge Gandhi to quit the India movement, or dance to the strains of Blue Danube, belly dance like a belle from Beirut or be serenaded by an orchestra from London.” The group of us stared at the big sister, wondering how in the world she knew so much about The Imperial. My teacher and Jabril pressed for affirmation. Instead, she vociferated, “Notably, The Imperial has the largest collection on display of land war gallantry awards in India and among its neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Bhutan and China. It also holds a sizeable record of orders and decorations bestowed by the British Royalties to the Emperor of India as an honour to the local Maharajas, Sultans and ruling Princes from the various Indian states.” While Narnia’s chaperone continued her historical spiel, the recruit pulled me aside and whispered amusingly, “Although everything my big sister said is true, she’s having fun with you guys. Her information is from the hotel’s brochure in the guest rooms.” I quipped. “Why didn’t you tell the rest of our group? I thought she was an expert in India’s history!” She gave me a wet kiss and said saucily, “I’m telling you because I like you.” Stunned by her raciness, I was speechless. I couldn’t decide whether to tell her there and then that I was gay – but at that very moment, Andy appeared from around the corner. “Where did you two disappear to?” he inquired. When Narnia was out of earshot, I muttered knowingly to my BB, “I’ll tell you later.”, as we continued the art tour browsing portraitures of India’s Princely Rulers of yore.
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
Even though every discernment is unique, your search for data should always involve collecting four kinds of information: Intrapersonal information (from within your unique self). Ask yourself: What are my personality and work preferences? Time, energy, and health? Economic resources? Do I notice that I am having any particular physical responses as I think about the situation? What do I deeply desire? Interpersonal information (through face-to-face relationships). Ask yourself: Who are the people close to me who will be affected by my choice? How will this proposed option be likely to affect my interpersonal relationships, especially with those close to me or with whom I have prior commitments, especially my family? What supporting relationships exist for me personally? Structural information (from pondering those organizations, personal and impersonal, that exist regardless of the individual players). Ask yourself: What structures are in play here? What are their goals, their reasons for existing? What are their dynamics? What would be my role and responsibility in these systems if I were to make the decision I am pondering? How is power exercised? Who or what is marginalized in these structures, and what would they say if they could talk with me? Information from the natural world (from the environment in which we are embedded). Ask yourself: What is the environment—the physical context, both human and natural—like? How does the human-made environment exist within or against the natural world? Is this an environment that invites or repels me? What kind of impact will my actions have on the environment? After you’ve gathered your data, the next step is to interpret it, and it’s helpful to use the same four categories as interpretive lenses: Intrapersonal (your inner response). Ask yourself: Does the data give me energy? excitement? courage? confidence? tranquillity? satisfaction? Or are my reactions to it more like discouragement, anxiety, insecurity, agitation, dissatisfaction? Or, as is often the case, is my response a mixture of the two? Interpersonal (the reactions between you and those persons close to you or who would be affected by your decision). Ask yourself: How do I feel about the possible effects of my proposed decision on those close to me? What do these people say about my proposed option? How do others who are more objective about the choice facing me interpret the information that I have received; do expert interpreters agree or disagree regarding the information I have uncovered? Structural (what an analysis of the institutions, systems, and structures in which you live and work—or into which you would be moving—suggests about the matter at hand). Ask yourself: How will the various systems in my life have to be readjusted if I move in this direction: family, work, school, community involvement, relationship to worshiping community, and so on? What values are these systems preserving, and are these values worth it to me? In what way are the systems likely to resist my proposed change? What price could I pay? How does this feel to me? 4. Natural world (from the largest perspective, that of the grand scheme of things). Ask yourself: Does being in nature tell me anything about my proposed decision? Will it, or how will it, affect the environment? If I could stand on top of the world and look down, how would this decision appear?
Elizabeth Liebert (The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making)
You Can File and Suspend to Get Benefits for Your Spouse To enable your spouse to receive spousal benefits, you need to file for your retirement benefit. But you don’t need to take your retirement benefit if you file after reaching FRA. You can, instead, file and suspend—that is, file for your benefit, but suspend its collection. This way you can wait until 70 to begin taking your own retirement benefit, when it will be at its largest value thanks to the Delayed Retirement Credit.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff (Get What's Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security (The Get What's Yours Series))
The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking.
Alex Pentland (Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter)
Paris on the Nile’ or the ‘finery of Cairo’, Al-Ismailiya – a district to which Ismael gave his name – comprised large, wide avenues, piazzas, belle époque buildings and urban public gardens.8 He brought steam shipping to the Nile, which revolutionized internal trading. He was a major patron of the arts and created the Cairo Opera House, another architectural jewel. He founded Dar-Al-Kuttub (the National Library), an ambitious project that started with more than 250,000 volumes, most of which were gathered from Egyptian, Levantine, Turkish and European collections, and which grew to become the region's largest library and one of the cultural treasures of the world.
Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
Sail the Lost Sea America’s largest underground lake is tucked away beneath Tennessee, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. After you tour the caves 140 feet belowground, hop into a glass-bottom boat to float across the Lost Sea and spot large collections of wild-looking cave formations and 20,000-year-old jaguar tracks.
Anonymous
There’s one.” Roy reached over and pounded Bert in the leg. “Slug bug black, no hit backs.” “Where?” “Right there.” “That’s a BMW.” Bert smacked Roy twice. “Wrong car, double hit backs.” “Can you guys quit this, please?” Tom looked ahead in the distance. “Oh God, no.” “Here it is.” The cabbie pointed to his right. “Largest Volkswagen dealership in Los Angeles.” It was ugly. Real ugly. When
J.A. Konrath (The List (The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective #1))
her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.
Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
We know that the backbone virus in SARS-CoV-2 is a horseshoe bat coronavirus,” he explains. “Those horseshoe bats live in southern China. Wuhan is well beyond their range. Wuhan doesn’t have horseshoe bats. This pandemic began in the middle of winter. But what Wuhan does have is China’s only level-4 virology institute, with the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses, that was doing aggressive gain-of-function research, including to make those highly pathogenic viruses more transmissible to human cells. We know that when the outbreak began, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost perfectly adapted for transmission to humans.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
Lake Hopatcong symbolizes a shared heritage and collective responsibility.
Peter Astras (Lake Hopatcong: A History of New Jersey’s Largest Lake (Natural History))
True Story:- Once upon a time, there was a man named Shree Om who, along with more than three hundred individuals, set out on a journey to visit the largest tulip garden in the world, located across various realms of the earth. This journey had been planned meticulously for many months. However, on that particular day, nature seemed to be against them. The sky was covered with dark clouds, and it was raining. Advanced weather monitoring systems from Space station had predicted heavy rainfall for the day. Nevertheless, Shree Om, with his compassionate nature, kindly order the king of the heaven, Indra, to intervene and temporarily stop the rain to prevent disruption to their plans. The dark clouds that veiled the sky and the pouring rain were dispelled by Shreeom's command, allowing everyone, including more than twenty thousands who had gathered from various places, to enjoy the vibrant colors of the flowers in the garden. Indra swiftly removed the clouds and cleared the sky to welcome the sun for Shreeom's arrival. SriOm told his first Yog to Pashupatinath (Bhabam), to the Sun and divinity in the beginning of his knowledge. Shreeom, at his will, could turn bodies of water into tranquil seas, rivers for bathing and swimming as well as to create Brahma, but at that moment, he chose to the humble path and cooperated with Mahalaxmi, the sun, moon, stars and various Devi Devtas to ensure harmony and sustenance in the universe. Shree Om is the Vishnu himself. Shree Om and Mahalaxmi represented the divine consort, illustrating the profound interconnectedness and balance in the cosmic universal order. Shreeom, along with Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the various gods and goddesses, and especially Mahalakshmi Bhavani, along with the sun, moon, and the constellations of stars, collectively uphold and create the entire universe.
Sri Om
Cana’an is a crossroads of the earth. Be it birds or seeds, humans looking for life and refuge, or empires with a will to dominate for power and profit, this land has been frequented by many over the course of the past several thousand years. Our collective diasporas make one of the largest in the world, and our migrational lines are as complex with layers. Despite constant war, endless stories of exile, migration, language loss, and land degradation, there is palpable vitality and wholeness in the elements of place that still live through us. There is a lesson here—a medicine in this crossroads of rupture and immense resilience and revitalization at once, where loss insists on continuation, and life recreates itself constantly through the persistence of tending what remains, from wherever we are. No matter what has been lost or taken, a way persists as long as we do. Plants of place and origin are an interwoven part of these understated worlds that mend and make belonging. They, like our ancestors, have adapted to the challenges of lifetimes, embedding wayfinding intelligence inside of us. When we are lost or have forgotten, they have the power to re-member us. They wake up the ancestral lifelines inside of us. Every time we eat our cultural foods, harvest and prepare our medicines, nurture the soil where we are, plant ancient seeds in new places, these legacies bless our bodies and guide our beings back into union with deeper sources of life’s fundamental wisdoms and the earth’s unfaltering guidance.
Layla K. Feghali (The Land in Our Bones)
Into this situation, came the Reagan Administration’s bizarre collection of “free market” economic conundrums, called by their advocates, “Supply-Side” economics. The idea was thin cover for unleashing some of the highest rates of short-term personal profiteering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health. While policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries, brought a huge windfall of financial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan‘s zeal for lifting the government “shackles” off financial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world financial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s “free market” had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well. On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release “stifled creative energies” and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history in August 1981. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that “anything goes,” so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
The most severe impact of the oil crisis hit the United States’ largest city, New York. In December 1974, nine of the world’s most powerful bankers, led by David Rockefeller‘s Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and the London-New York investment bank, Lazard Freres, told the Mayor of New York, an old-line machine politician named Abraham Beame, that unless he turned over control of the city’s huge pension funds to a committee of the banks, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the banks and their influential friends in the media would ensure financial ruin to the city. Not surprisingly, the overpowered Mayor capitulated, New York City was forced to slash spending for roadways, bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt, and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers. The nation’s greatest city was turned into a scrap heap beginning then. Felix Rohatyn, of Lazard Freres, became head of the new bankers’ collection agency, dubbed by the press as ‘Big MAC.
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
The largest joke has been collected a movie.
Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
We needed a soluition to one very basic problem. Why was it so difficult to get people to try a new browser. That's how we became motivated to find new distribution deals for Chrome. Down the road when we found that people were unclear about just what a browser did for them, we turned to television marketing to explain it. Our Chrome ads represented the largest offline campaign in the company's history. People still remember 'Dear Sophie', a spot created around a father's digital scrapbook as she grew up... it lead people to the internet as an applications platform. Try - Fail; Try - Succeed.
John Doerr (Measure What Matters, Blitzscaling, Scale Up Millionaire, The Profits Principles 4 Books Collection Set)
The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.
Mattew Ball
First, reframe the purpose of taxes to help build social consensus for the kind of higher-tax, higher-returns public sector that has been a proven success in many Scandinavian countries. And remember, the verbal framing expert George Lakoff advises to choose your words wisely: don’t oppose tax relief—talk about tax justice. Likewise, the notion of public spending is often used by those who oppose it to evoke a never-ending outlay. Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods—such as high-quality schools and effective public transport—that underpin collective well-being.57 Second, end the extraordinary injustice of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting and special exemptions that allow many of the world’s richest people and largest corporations—from Amazon to Zara—to pay negligible tax in the countries in which they live and do business. At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.58 At the same time, transnational corporations shift around $660 billion of their profits each year to near-zero tax jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda and Luxembourg.59 The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is among those focused on tackling this, campaigning worldwide for greater corporate transparency and accountability, fair international tax rules, and progressive national tax systems.60 Third, shifting both personal and corporate taxation away from taxing income streams and towards taxing accumulated wealth—such as real estate and financial assets—will diminish the role played by a growing GDP in ensuring sufficient tax revenue. Of course progressive tax reforms such as these can quickly encounter pushback from the corporate lobby, along with claims of state incompetence and corruption. This only reinforces the importance of strong civic engagement in promoting and defending political democracies that can hold the state to account.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If we restore the ecosystem function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system. It gives me the shivers just to write about it. Because so much of this park will be created at our homes, I suggest we call it Homegrown National Park.
Douglas W. Tallamy (Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard)
Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
Merrill Lynch had circulated internal memos about the risks in Citron’s portfolio as early as 1992, but those warnings didn’t stir action, let alone caution. Clearly, many senior people within the bank knew that what they were doing was wrong, yet they let it continue, selling him riskier and riskier derivatives and collecting their fees and commissions each time. Orange County had become one of Merrill’s top-five clients, as well as one of the largest purchasers of derivative securities in the world. The bank wasn’t willing to jeopardize the loss of that business, no matter how precarious and unsuitable Citron’s investments were. His own lawyer later argued that the sixty-nine-year-old Citron tested at a seventh-grade level in math, had a severe learning disability, and had long been suffering from dementia. Citron himself admitted that he lacked a basic understanding of what he had done and that he had simply been following the advice of his bankers. They’d held his hand and led him to the slaughter.
Christopher Varelas (How Money Became Dangerous: The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance)
In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said. Cambridge Analytica had amassed an arsenal of data on the American public of unprecedented size and scope, the largest, as far as he knew, anyone had ever assembled. The company’s monster databases held between two thousand and five thousand individual data points (pieces of personal information) on every individual in the United States over the age of eighteen. That amounted to some 240 million people.
Brittany Kaiser (Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again)
But that’s crazy!” Pep said. “Who would attack the largest ball of twine in the world?” “The largest cat in the world?” suggested Coke.
Dan Gutman (The Genius Files 4-Book Collection: Mission Unstoppable, Never Say Genius, You Only Die Twice, From Texas with Love)