Margin Call Best Quotes

there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips.

Radical obedience, at the heart, is the sheer act of saying, "Yes, Lord." Yes, I'll go there. Yes, I'll do that. I'll give you my best effort because YOU are worthy of my best offering. Radical obedience is a zealous commitment to fulfilling whatever holy work God sets in front of our hands. This means where God calls, we go. When God calls us to write, we write. When God asks us to sing, we sing. As artists made in the image of the ultimate Artist, we paint and draw and sew and sculpt, not bitterly or lazily, but with enthusiasm, devotion, and a sense of joyful eagerness to participate. Because when we link arms with our Creator to do what He uniquely designed us to do, we usher a bit of the Kingdom into this world--and God gets the glory for it.

What if the formula “more stuff equals more happiness” is bad math? What if more stuff often just equals more stress? More hours at the office, more debt, more years working in a job I don’t feel called to, more time wasted cleaning and maintaining and fixing and playing with and organizing and reorganizing and updating all that junk I don’t even need. What if more stuff actually equals less of what matters most? Less time. Less financial freedom. Less generosity, which according to Jesus is where the real joy is. Less peace, as I hurry my way through the mall parking lot. Less focus on what life is actually about. Less mental real estate for creativity. Less relationships. Less margin. Less prayer. Less of what I actually ache for? What if I were to reject my culture’s messaging as a half-truth at best, if not a full-on lie, and live into another message? Another gospel?

He was the youngest and newest member of a four-man team. Hence, low man on the totem pole. Except that calling a new guy the low man on the totem pole was completely ass-backward. Totem poles were what? Twenty, thirty feet high? Native Americans weren’t dumb. They put the most important guy at the bottom. At eye level. What important guy wanted to be twenty or thirty feet off the ground, where no one could see him? Like supermarkets. The eye-level shelf was reserved for the best stuff. The high-margin items. The big corporations hired experts to figure out stuff like that. Eye level was what it was all about. Thus the low man was really the high man, and the high man was really the low man. In a manner of speaking. A common misperception. A kind of linguistic inversion. Caleb Carter didn’t know how it had come about. Night watch was

No white people in my office on that spring day in 1968. On the other hand, visualizing the presence of some sweaty, ham-fisted, Caucasian version of John Henry, the steel-driving man, hammering iron wedges between the students and me, incarcerating us behind bars as invisible as he was, clarifies the encounter. Why weren’t novels and poems by Americans of African descent being taught at the university? Why were so few of us attending and almost none of us teaching there? What rationales and agendas were served by dispensing knowledge through arbitrary, territorial “fields”? Why had the training I’d received in the so-called “best” schools alienated me from my particular cultural roots and brainwashed me into believing in some objective, universal, standard brand of culture and art—essentialist, hierarchical classifications of knowledge—that doomed people like me to marginality on the campus and worse, consigned the vast majority of us who never reach college to a stigmatized, surplus underclass.

Following the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades of middle school, high school would have been a fresh start. When I got to Fairfax High I would insist on being called Suzanne. I would wear my hair feathered or up in a bun. I would have a body that the boys wanted and the girls envied, but I’d be so nice on top of it all that they would feel too guilty to do anything but worship me. I liked to think of myself — having reached a sort of queenly W status — as protecting misfit kids in the cafeteria. When someone taunted Clive Saunders for walking like a girl, I would deliver swift vengeance with my foot to the taunter’s less-protected parts. When the boys teased Phoebe Hart for her sizable breasts, I would give a speech on why boob jokes weren’t funny. I had to forget that I too had made lists in the margins of my notebook when Phoebe walked by: Winnebagos, Hoo-has, Johnny Yellows. At the end of my reveries, I sat in the back of the car as my father drove. I was beyond reproach. I would overtake high school in a matter of days, not years, or, inexplicably, earn an Oscar for Best Actress during my junior year. These were my dreams on Earth.

Although the traditional concept of recycling had long since been popularized and accepted by the mainstream as basic civic responsibility, its benefits did not always hold up under close scrutiny since the amount of energy and other resources that went into the various processes—and all of the detrimental by-products that resulted—very legitimately called the entire theory into question. The reality of traditional consumer recycling was that it yielded a slender margin of benefit at best, and at worst, might have actually done a great deal of harm, representing little more than a psychological placebo designed to alleviate collective guilt over massive amounts of unfettered overconsumption, thereby accelerating the pace of global resource depletion. But once the question of energy (and

For decades, the exploitative capitalist system and neoliberalism have been trying to persuade the world that it is for our best interest to reduce (or even erase) the public sector and give more power to the greedy private sector. They have been pushing -with great success – for the privatization of every service that can benefit the poor and marginalized people. They have and still are trying to get rid of universal healthcare anywhere their hands can reach. Why do they do so? The answer is simpler than we think: it is to keep people at the mercy of the greedy capitalist system that sees individuals as either potential cheap laborers to benefit from or a burden to dispose of when no longer usable. This global pandemic should be a wake-up call to all of us about how duped the world has been all along by this narrative. How many more disasters and pandemics will it take for the world to wake up?

What’s going on?  What news?” I said glancing between the two. Sam gave Clay a sharp look. “You didn’t tell her?” “He’s not talking to me, yet,” I said, wondering what bad news Sam had to share. Sam shook his head at Clay.  “You’ve dug your own hole then, son.”  He focused on me.  “A group of Forlorn have asked Elder Joshua to approach you for an unofficial kind of Introduction.  Joshua approved, but he made it clear they were to keep it brief and then leave, unless any of them had a further request of him.” The meaning of Sam’s words sunk in deep like a vicious bite.  It also explained his less than warm greeting.  He stood in my living room as an Elder on pack business, not as family or a friend.  I struggled to contain my anger. “I thought I was done with that.  We had a deal.”  I crossed my arms and coldly regarded Sam.  “I know I said I was done.” The carefully, composed expression on Sam’s face faltered a bit.  “Honey, there are rules we must follow to keep peace in the pack.  Clay had six months to convince you of his suit.  That time has passed.  That means unMated can once again approach you, with permission.” My mouth popped open.  Six months.  Permission from an Elder.  That’s why they’d stationed Joshua here.  A backup plan because they knew I didn’t want to Claim Clay.  They failed to understand I didn’t want to Claim anyone.  I’d never been free.  I clenched my fists.  My temper boiled. “That’s complete crap,” I gritted out.  “First of all, I didn’t reject anyone.  Second, no one ever told me about this stupid rule.”  My voice rose to a yell, and I took a deep breath and closed my eyes briefly to restrain myself.  When I reopened them, I felt more in control and able to speak calmly.  “You know what?  I don’t care what the pack rules are.  I gave you my word and my time.  Now, I expect you to keep yours.  I worked hard to get here, Sam.  I won’t let anyone take this away from me.”  My hands shook.  That Sam had cared for me in the past and given me a place to call home for two years, kept my tongue marginally civil. “By not completing the Claim, you’ve become eligible again.  Charlene was granted a special consideration because, at that time, we weren’t even sure a Claiming would be possible between a human and a werewolf.  Now that we know it is, you fall under the same rules,” Sam explained calmly, his face again carefully devoid of emotion. “No, I don’t.”  I knew I could stand there and argue all day with Sam, and he wouldn’t budge.  It would always be whatever’s best for the pack with him.  “Is this why Clay was beat up?” Clay made a noise—like a snort of disagreement—behind me. “Feel free to jump in at any time,” I said, turning to arch an eyebrow at him.  He remained mute, but his eyes softened when he looked at me. Sam spoke up from behind me, but I didn’t turn to look at him. “Gabby, it’s the reason he’s been fighting.  He’s not relinquishing his tie to you.  Every time an unMated shows up here, he will challenge that man for his right for an Introduction.  Did Clay get beat up?  Only as a byproduct of handing out beatings.” Clay steadily met my gaze the entire time.  It broke my heart a little to know he was fighting so hard to keep me, and all I’d given him in those six months was a kiss.  Not even spontaneously given, but relinquished as part of a bribe.  I hadn’t rejected him.  I just didn’t want to be forced into a choice.  If I chose to be with Clay, I wanted it to be on our terms. “Why

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

Recently, a large company offered to buy one of our portfolio companies. The deal was lucrative and compelling given the portfolio company’s progress to date and revenue level. The founder/CEO (I’ll call him Hamlet—not his real name) thought that selling did not make sense due to the giant market opportunity that he was pursuing, but he still wanted to make sure that he made the best possible choice for investors and employees. Hamlet wanted to reject the offer, but only marginally. To complicate matters, most of the management team and the board thought the opposite. It did not help that the board and the management team were far more experienced than Hamlet. As a result, Hamlet spent many sleepless nights worrying about whether he was right. He realized that it was impossible to know. This did not help him sleep. In the end, Hamlet made the best and most courageous decision he could and did not sell the company. I believe that will prove to be the defining moment of his career.

Call it gap, buffer, slack, or margin, allowing white space between our endless doing makes everything better.

If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best Would your business benefit from economies of scale? (Most web businesses do.) If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing—charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market-dominating economies of scale. Supply-side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales (unit costs) usually becomes lower, and your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand-side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service, for the following reasons. You may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made (one between User A and User B). If it had three users, then three types of call could be made (A–B, B–C and A-C). If it had twelve users, sixty-six different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project-management web app Basecamp has many integrations, which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it’s acquiring new users, to persuade other companies to add integrations. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums, or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. WordPress grows because it’s easy to find a WordPress developer and it’s easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner—especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company—so they will be attracted by the perception that you’ll win.

Ah, do we really have to use that word? It’s trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. That’s okay, we like that. But some gay girls and boys don’t. They think they’re more normal than strange. And for others “queer” conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering. Queer. It’s forcibly bittersweet and quaint at best—weakening and painful at worst. Couldn’t we just use “gay” instead? It’s a much brighter word and isn’t it synonymous with “happy”? When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being different? Well, yes, “gay” is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer. Using “queer” is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world . . . it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and use against him.

You’ll be able to handle the dream flops, or even the really terrible flops, but what do you do when you’re heavily involved in a hand before the flop but then have what for you is a marginal flop? What you do is raise your opponents as if you have hit the flop perfectly, and then watch to see how they react to your raises. If you get the strong impression that you’re beaten, on the basis of your opponents’ reactions to your raises, then fold. But if you’re pretty sure you still have the best hand, then keep on betting or calling.

Imperialism and not patriarchy is the core foundation of modern militarism (even though it serves the interest of imperialism to link notions of masculinity with the struggle to conquer nations and peoples). Many societies in the world that are ruled by males are not imperialistic; many women in the United States have made political decisions to support imperialism and militarism. Historically, white women in the United States, working for women's rights, have felt no contradiction between this effort and their support of the Western imperialist attempt to conquer the planet. Often they argued that equal rights would better enable white women to help in the building of this "great nation," i.e. in the cause of imperialism. Many white women in the early part of the twentieth century, who were strong advocates of women's liberation, were pro-imperialist. Books like Helen Montgomery's Western Women in Eastern Lands, published in 1910, outlining fifty years of white women's work in foreign missions, document the link between the struggle for the emancipation of white women in the United States and the imperialist, hegemonic spread of Western values and Western domination of the globe. As missionaries, white women traveled to Eastern lands armed with psychological weapons that undermined the belief systems of Eastern women and replaced them with Western values. In the closing statement of her work, Helen Montgomery writes: "So many voices are calling us, so many goods demand our allegiance, that we are in danger of forgetting the best. To seek first to bring Christ's kingdom on the earth, to respond to the need that is sorest, to go out into the desert for that loved and bewildered sheep that the shepherd has missed from the fold, to share all of the privilege with the unprivileged and happiness with the unhappy, to see the possibility of one redeemed earth, undivided, unvexed, unperplexed resting in the light of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, this is the mission of the women's missionary movement.

One thing I have learned as a competitor is that there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips. In line with that mind-set, most people think of injuries as setbacks, something they have to recover from or deal with. From the outside, for fans or spectators, an injured athlete is in purgatory, hovering in an impotent state between competing and sitting on the bench. In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intended people like my mother suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game. If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage. That

As I argue throughout this book, our mistakes disturb us in part because they call into question not just our confidence in a single belief, but our confidence in the entire act of believing. When we come to see one of our own past beliefs as false, we also glimpse, for a moment, the persistent structural possibility of error: our minds, the world, the gap between them—the whole unsettling shebang. As important and life-altering (and even gratifying) as this revelation can be, it runs contrary to what I’ve described here as one of the chief functions of a community: to buttress our sense that we are right, and protect us from constantly contending with the possibility that we are wrong. Small wonder that such revelations are so unwelcome within communities of believers, and bring down so much trouble on the individual member who abandons his or her faith. When we realize that we were wrong about a private belief, the chief thing we stand to lose is our pride. But when we share a belief with others, the stakes of rejecting it escalate astronomically. They include, as we’ve seen, the practical and emotional advantages of conforming with a community. But they also include the community itself—the trust, esteem, companionship, and love of the people we know best. Even more gravely, they include the stability and familiarity of our identities (for instance, as a devout Muslim), and our faith in the very existence of truth. Short of life and limb (which are occasionally on the line as well), the price of being wrong could scarcely be higher, and the experience could scarcely be more destabilizing.

Most businesses hustle to create revenue, pay out their various expenses, and with any luck, there’s a little profit left over for the owners.  Here’s what you’re probably learning in business school: Revenue minus expenses equals profits.  Sounds sensible, right?”  He paused for the group of nodding heads.  “Well, it’s not!  It is completely backwards.  It should be taught:  Revenue minus PROFITS equal expenses.” Our chaperoning professors did their best to hide their cloudy faces, but it was clear Mr. X didn’t mind offending them.  “Don’t wait to see if there’s anything left over for a profit.  By carving out a margin before you address expenses, you create a constraint on the resources available.  This constraint unlocks your creativity to meet customers’ needs, streamline operations, and only spend money on that which truly generates value.  There’s no room left for fluff and bloat.  Difficult decisions on how you should run your business become obvious. No longer fat, dumb and happy, maybe you make that extra sales call or hold off on that unnecessary expense.  Business is very competitive, and the difference between the Hall of Fame and the graveyard can be remarkably thin.  Everyone says they want to run a tight ship, but the best way to harness your entrepreneurial verve is to tie your own hands to the yarak mast.  It will turn all of your business SHOULDS into business MUSTS.  I’ve spent a lot of time finding different places to apply the idea of yarak, and it never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is.  So that’s my eighty-twenty secret.  Shh… don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.

The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed. But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.