Market Maker Quotes

To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

If you've taken a photo with your camera's pop-up flash, you're probably wondering how camera manufacturers list pop-up flash as a feature and keep a straight face. It's probably because the term "pop-up flash" is actually a marketing phrase dreamed up by a high-powered PR agency, because its original, more descriptive, and more accurate name is actually "the ugly-maker.

MOM = Maker of Miracles

Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.

Good publishers – as one former publisher aptly put it – are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce.

Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it knows of true beauty. The Indian basket-maker wove beautiful things but they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they do not consciously select it.

It's WW2 and there are wage controls in place. Instead of health care, companies decide to offer employees shoes. Having absorbed those costs, they later lobby for every company to be required to offer shoes. That calls forth regulation and monopolization of the shoe industry. Shoes are heavily subsidized. Every shoe must be approved. Producers must be domestic. They must adhere to a certain quality. They can't discriminate based on foot size or individual need. Prices rise, and some people lack shoes, so the Affordable Shoe Act forces everyone to buy into an official shoe plan or pay a fee. Here we have a perfect plan for making shoes egregiously expensive. The entire country would be consumed with the fear of being shoeless if they lose their job. The left wing calls for a single shoe provider to offer universal shoes and the right wing meekly suggests that shoe makers be permitted to sell across state lines. Meanwhile, libertarians suggest that we just forget the whole thing and let the market make and deliver shoes of every quality to anyone from anyone. Everyone screams that this is an insane and dangerous idea.

5)​Brokerage Systems Brokers bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions. They are market-makers for a particular industry and earn money typically on each transaction.

The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilisation; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker of art cannot complete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organisation and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a "job"; until finally the ancient society is industrialised and reduced to the level of such societies as ours in which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that Western nations are feared and hated by other people, not alone for obvious political or economic reasons, but even more profoundly and instinctively for spiritual reasons?

What roles do you want to play? Consider, for example the roles of: team builder; manager; individual contributor; change agent; technical expert; relationship builder; trouble shooter; someone who makes things happen; consolidator; problem solver; conceptualizer; big picture thinker; marketer; decision-maker; talent spotter/nurturer; mentor; turnaround artist; mediator.

My grandmother Rose was a tough woman, so tough she'd built the family home with her own hands while my grandpa worked as a tailor in the market. She'd even built the furnace and molded the bricks herself, which is not an easy job, and even today, not the job of a woman.

Once you are able to observe each phase, along with each strategy for each phase being played out, you only have to wait for the profit release phase and then join it.

It begs for a gospel of perseverance through inevitable failure... There is no antidote to the chaos of creative markets. Only the brute doggedness to endure it.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong

To connect with decision makers, we need to present ideas in their language, not ours. Know their business. Talk with them, not at them. Otherwise, they can't hear us when we speak.

Today financial capitalism is fraught with special interests, corporate monopolies, and an opacity that would have boggled Smith’s mind. Let me be clear: despite my criticism of our existing model of financial capitalism, this book isn’t anticapitalist. I am not in favor of a planned economy or a turn away from a market system. I simply don’t think that the system we have now is a properly functioning market system.

Decision makers aren't interested in our pain. They're interested in their pain. They accept or reject ideas based on whether or not they think we understand their painful problems and have the ability to solve them.

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

John Law’s life and his Mississippi Scheme had followed an identical arc of trajectory. Law had been both the maker and breaker of the Mississippi Scheme just as the Mississippi Scheme had been both the maker and breaker of Law.

Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?

In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.

What we want, what we need, what we must have are indispensable human beings. We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven't realized this yet, or haven't articulated it, but we need artists. Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.

And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers - however loving, however liberal - would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.

We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference.

Capitalism can encourage artists, including chefs and cookbook authors, to suppress parts of themselves to cater to the market’s desires. I started to see this book as a critique of capitalism: how it devalues labor to the point where it makes people into products, longevity in American memory contingent on your ability to sell yourself.

The mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles a virus. Popularity on the internet is driven by the size of the largest broadcast. Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments.

The burden of deciding when to launch something is on the maker, not a marketer. If something is launched or a bug is fixed, data is instantly collected about how it's used, which serves as the basis to make quick revisions. There are no big schedules, few big plans, and no enforced mechanisms for coordination. It sounds like chaos, and it is. But if everyone understood chaos and perhaps liked the uncertainty, they would find freedom and opportunity.

Our goal should be to make decision makers internalize the full consequences of their decisions, rather than prevent them from making decisions altogether [...] But we tend to reform under the delusion that the regulated institutions and the markets they operate in are static and passive, and that the regulatory environment will not vary with the cycle. Ironically, faith in draconian regulation is strongest at the bottom of the cycle, when there is little need for participants to be regulated. By contrast, the misconception that markets will govern themselves is most widespread at the top of the cycle, at the point of maximum danger to the system. We need to acknowledge these differences and enact cycle-proof regulation, for a regulation set against the cycle will not stand. To have a better chance of creating stability throughout the cycle--of being cycle-proof--new regulations should be comprehensive, nondiscretionary, contingent, and cost-effective.

...with the unblinking assumption, that science has cornered the market on truth and there's not much room for discussion. Undeterred, we carried on. The basket makers had given us the prerequisites of the scientific method: observation, pattern, and a testable hypothesis. That sounded like science to me. So we began by setting up experimental plots in the meadows to ask the plants the question "Do these two different harvest methods contribute to decline" And then we tried to detect their answer.

The natives use human excrement for tanning leather. When Bernal Diaz came with Cortés to the great market-place of Mexico City, in Montezuma's day, he saw the little pots of human excrement in rows for sale, and the leather-makers going round sniffing to see which was the best, before they paid for it. It staggered even a fifteenth-century Spaniard. Yet my leather man and his wife think it screamingly funny that I smell the huaraches before buying them. Everything has its own smell, and the natural smell of huaraches is what it is. You might as well quarrel with an onion for smelling like an onion.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

But something changed in the 1980s, when Wall Street itself went from being a service industry - lucrative and powerful but still client centered and partner-oriented - to being an industry in its own right. Then, no longer tethered by the risk to their own money, these newly flush public companies, and many private ones that benefited from the efflorescence of money in the frothy public markets, started to think of themselves as product makers and profit centers in their own right. They started to expect excessive returns and outsized compensation, and they took on levels of risk that in time came to imperil the whole system because they were without fear of substantial personal loss.

Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn’t open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact, the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open—you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) "aggravated" to see that all goes on just as usual with the millowners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food--of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

The maker of an advertised article knows the manufacturing side and probably the dealers side. But this very knowledge often leads him astray in respect to customers. His interests are not in their interests. The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else. This book will contain no more important chapter than this one on salesmanship. The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship. Ads are planned and written with some utterly wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interest of the buyer are forgotten. One can never sell goods profitably, in person or in print, when that attitude exists.

It was a familiar trick, I thought to myself, the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that had become a staple of conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue: taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem is no longer discrimination against people of color, the argument goes; it’s “reverse racism,” with minorities “playing the race card” to get an unfair advantage. The problem isn’t sexual harassment in the workplace; it’s humorless “feminazis” beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem is not bankers using the market as their personal casino, or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs. It’s the lazy and shiftless, along with their liberal Washington allies, intent on mooching off the economy’s real “makers and the doers.

His argument is that the system’s much lauded economic, political, and social freedoms, formerly a source of social progress, lose their progressive function and become subtle instruments of domination which serve to keep individuals in bondage to the system that they strengthen and perpetuate. For example, economic freedom to sell one’s labor power in order to compete on the labor market submits the individual to the slavery of an irrational economic system; political freedom to vote for generally indistinguishable representatives of the same system is but a delusive ratification of a nondemocratic political system; intellectual freedom of expression is ineffectual when the media either co-opt and defuse, or distort and suppress, oppositional ideas, and when the image-makers shape public opinion so that it is hostile or immune to oppositional thought and action. Marcuse

If we look at the way an industrial producer creates new products, we see a long list of trials and errors and eventually improvement in quality at a lower cost. Urban policies and strategies, by contrast, often do not follow this logic; they are often repeated even when it is well known that they failed. For instance, policies like rent control, greenbelts, new light rail transports, among others, are constantly repeated in spite of a near consensus on their failure to achieve their objectives. A quantitative evaluation of the failure of these policies is usually well documented through special reports or academic papers; it is seldom produced internally by cities, however, and the information does not seem to reach urban decision makers. Only a systematic analysis of data through indicators allows urban policies to be improved over time and failing policies to be abandoned. But as Angus Deaton wrote: 'without data, anyone who does anything is free to claim success.

The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid. Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008. Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.

The Beatles were particularly prominent examples, and Dylan’s central position in rock history is rooted in that brief period when he and the Beatles were running neck and neck. He released Bringing It All Back Home in the spring of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited that summer, and Blonde on Blonde a year later. Rubber Soul, the first Beatles album conceived as a cohesive artistic statement, was released in December 1965, followed by Revolver seven months later. In commercial terms the Beatles were in a different league: on the American market, they released four LPs of new material in 1965 and two in 1966, and each spent more than five weeks at number one on Billboard’s album chart, while Dylan would not have a number one album until the mid-1970s. But they were evolving from teen-pop hit-makers into mature, thoughtful artists, with Dylan as their acknowledged model. McCartney recalled playing him a tape of their new songs when he came through London in the spring of 1966: “He said, ‘O I get it, you don’t want to be cute anymore!’ That summed it up. . . . The cute period had ended. It started to be art.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.

The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.

People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

This neo-liberal establishment would have us believe that, during its miracle years between the 1960s and the 1980s, Korea pursued a neo-liberal economic development strategy. The reality, however, was very different indeed. What Korea actually did during these decades was to nurture certain new industries, selected by the government in consultation with the private sector, through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support (e.g., overseas marketing information services provided by the state export agency) until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition. The government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business-credit. Some big projects were undertaken directly by state-owned enterprises-the steel maker, POSCO, being the best example-although the country had a pragmatic, rather than ideological, attitude to the issue of state ownership. If private enterprises worked well, that was fine; if they did not invest in important areas, the government had no qualms about setting up state-owned enterprises (SOEs); and if some private enterprises were mismanaged, the government often took them over, restructured them, and usually (but not always) sold them off again.

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.

WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?

Clip This Article on Location 1397 | Added on Monday, September 1, 2014 4:10:39 PM REVIEW & OUTLOOK An $8.3 Billion Rebuke to the FDA Roche buys a drug approved in Europe but not in America. 359 words Amid this summer's M&A fever, Roche's agreement Monday to buy the San Francisco biotech InterMune deserves special notice. The tie-up is an $8.3 billion guided missile into the fortified bunker that is the Food and Drug Administration. InterMune has never turned a profit in 16 years of existence and other than its clinical expertise the company holds a single asset: an idea for treating a lethal lung disorder called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis with no known cause, cure or approved therapy—at least in the U.S. An InterMune drug called pirfenidone that slows the progression of irreversible lung scarring is on the market in Europe, Japan, Canada and even China. Bloomberg News But the FDA refused to approve pirfenidone in 2010, despite the 40,000 Americans who are killed annually by lung fibrosis and a positive recommendation from its outside scientific advisory committee. The agency brass claimed the evidence was statistically unsatisfactory, when one clinical trial was inconclusive but another showed strong benefits such as improved lung function. The results of the third trial the FDA ordered were reported earlier this year and confirmed that pirfenidone is even more of a treatment advance than it seemed in 2010, and may prolong life. The agency is expected, finally, to approve the medicine in November. Roche is paying a 38% premium over Friday's closing share price, and 63% over trading before the news of InterMune's corporate suitors broke a few weeks ago. The deal is a big vote of confidence in pirfenidone, not least because a rival lung fibrosis drug is awaiting U.S. approval. Then again, maybe that drug's maker, the German pharmaceutical consortium Boehringer Ingelheim, will have the same FDA experience as InterMune. The Roche deal is a tacit reprimand to the FDA's unscientific and uncompassionate—and wrong—2010 defenestration. Amid medical ambiguity about effectiveness, the humane option is to allow a drug to come to patients and follow on with more research, in particular for a drug with few side effects. Pulmonary fibrosis is a protracted death sentence of three to five years. The FDA denied tens of thousands of dying people better and possibly longer lives in the time they had left. ==========

We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists.

The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.

During dessert Vikki finally managed to edge in one complaint. “It was our first anniversary last month,” she said, “and do you know what my newlywed besotted husband bought me? A food processor! Me—a food processor!” “It was a hint, Viktoria.” Vikki theatrically rolled her eyes. Richter just rolled his. Trying not to smile, Alexander glanced at Tania, who was loving on her death-by-chocolate cake and hardly paying attention. She embraced electric gadgets with all her heart. There was not an electric can opener, a blender, a coffee maker that did not get his wife wildly enthusiastic. She window shopped for these items every Saturday, read their manuals in the store and then at night regaled Alexander with their technical attributes, as if the manuals she was reciting were Pushkin’s poetry. “Tania, darling, my closest friend,” said Vikki, “please tell me you agree. Don’t you think a food processor is extremely unromantic?” After thinking carefully, her mouth full, Tatiana said, “What kind of food processor?” For Christmas, Alexander bought Tatiana a Kitchen-Aid food processor, top of the line, the best on the market. Inside it she found a gold necklace. Despite a very full house, and Anthony right outside on the couch, she made love to Alexander that Christmas night in candlelight wearing nothing but the necklace, perched and posted on top of him, her soft silken hair floating in a mane and her warm breasts swinging into his chest.

AUDIENCE ORIENTATION: Social marketers view their audience as decision-makers with choices, rather than students to be educated, or incorrigibles to be regulated. Social Marketing begins with a bottom-up versus a top-down perspective, and therefore rejects the paternalist notion that “experts know what is best and will tell people how to behave for their own good” in favor of an audience-centered approach which seeks to understand what people want and provide them support in acquiring it.

zero patience for anybody that came off as a whiner, complainer, or excuse-maker.

The biggest drawback, of course, is that you immediately scare away all survivors, and your only remaining users will be apologists. This seriously skews the nature and quality of your feedback, condemning you to a clientele of technoid apologists, which is a relatively small segment. This is one reason why so few personal-computer software-product makers have successfully crossed over into mass markets.

The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market.

Although microbial testing kits are starting to emerge on the market,

作为零售外汇交易者，你可能会遇到三类主要的定价模式： ▷直通式处理模式（straight through pricing model） ▷做市商模式（market maker model） ▷电子通信网络模式（electronic communications network——ECN model）

Many blitzscalers, such as Amazon or the Chinese hardware makers Huawei and Xiaomi, deliberately price their products to maximize market share rather than gross margins. As Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, “Your margin is my opportunity

It was so complex. The number of destinations for trading stocks was maddening. There were four public exchanges: the NYSE, Nasdaq, Direct Edge, and BATS (the latter two, which specialized in high-speed trading, appeared on the scene in 2005 and 2006, respectively). Inside each of those exchanges were various other destinations. The NYSE had NYSE Arca, NYSE Amex, NYSE Euronext, and NYSE Alternext. Nasdaq had three markets. BATS had two. Direct Edge had EDGA, which had no “maker-taker” system, and EDGX, which did.

When presenting ideas, help decision makers get past their myopia. It's easy for clients to say no to an idea right in front of them. But if they can visualize your idea's future value, they'll have an easier time saying yes.

Socialism’s main defects are the inability of political decision-makers to make rational decisions without the information provided by prices generated by marketplace transactions; the misalignment of incentives and resources; and the subjugation of economic necessities to political mandates with no basis in material economic reality. It is the last of these, above all, that makes socialism dangerous. As Mises’s colleague F. A. Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, central planners frustrated by their inability to mold the economic world to their will inevitably are tempted to run roughshod over the rights and interests of the individuals they purport to serve. Sometimes this takes the relatively innocuous form of high-handed officials in the Canadian public-health service denying a procedure or timely access to care; sometimes it takes one of the diverse forms explored with such horrific vigor by Kim Jong Il.

The Netscape offering changed that equation. Originally, Netscape planned to sell 3.5 million shares to the public at $14 each, a price that valued the company at about $500 million. Given that Netscape had posted only $17 million in sales—sales, not profits—during the previous six months, a half-billion-dollar valuation seemed highly optimistic. But not to investors looking for the next you-know-what. Netscape’s roadshows were mobbed; tech geeks who had never before bought a stock wanted to own the Navigator. One technology stock analyst said getting a session with Netscape’s management before the offering “was like getting a one-on-one with God.”3 With demand overwhelming, Netscape and Morgan Stanley, its underwriter, increased both the size and price of the offering, eventually selling 5 million shares at $28. Still, demand far outstripped supply; investors placed orders for 100 million shares, and Morgan Stanley had to decide which clients to favor with the limited number of shares it had available. “They don’t get any hotter than this,” the Journal reported the morning that Netscape opened for trading. With so much unmet demand, it was obvious that Netscape would begin trading far above the $28 offering. After struggling for hours to set a price, the Nasdaq’s market makers finally opened Netscape at $71 per share. It rose as high as $75 before settling back to end the day at $58.25. At that price the company was valued at more than $2 billion—one hundred times its trailing sales.

So he proposed “small batch,” a term most often applied to bourbon. In the spirits world, this implies handcrafted care. But it can broadly refer to businesses focused more on the quality of their products than on the size of the market.

What does True Wireless Earbuds Mean Where are my earphones? Ahh!! There they are….and they are tangled (with irksome scream inside your head). There is nothing more frustrating than going on a search operation for your headphones and finally finding them entangled. Well thanks to the advance technology these days one of your daily struggles is gone with the arrival of wireless earphones in the market. No wire means no entanglement. ‘Kill the problem before it kills you’, you know the saying. Right! So what actually truly wireless earbuds are? Why should you replace your old headphones and invest in wireless ones? Without any further delay let’s dig deep into it. image WHAT ARE TRUE WIRELESS EARBUDS? A lot of people misunderstand true wireless earbuds and wireless earphones as the same thing. When it’s not. A true wireless earbuds which solely connects through Bluetooth and not through any wire or cord or through any other source. While wireless earphones are the ones which are connected through Bluetooth to audio source but the connection between the two ear plugs is established through a cable between them. Why true wireless earbuds? Usability: Who doesn’t like freedom! With no wire restrictions, it’s easier to workout without sacrificing your music motivation. From those super stretch yoga asanas to marathon running, from weight training to cycling - you actually can do all those without worrying about your phone safety or the dilemma of where to put them. With no wire and smooth distance connection interface, you have the full freedom of your body movement. They also comes with a charging case so you don’t have to worry about it’s battery. Good audio quality and background noise cancellation: With features like active noise cancellation, which declutter the unwanted background voice giving you the ultimate audio quality. These earbuds has just leveled up the experience of music and prevents you from getting distracted. Comfort and design: These small ear buddies are friendly which snuggles into your ear canal and don’t put too much pressure on your delicate ears as they are light weight. They are style statement maker and are comfortable to use even when you are on move, they stick to your ear and don’t fall off easily. Apart from all that you can easily answer your call on go, pause your music or whatever you are listening, switch to next by just touching your earplugs. image Convenience: You don’t necessarily have to have your phone on you like the wired ones. The farthest distance you could go was the length of the cable. But with wireless ones this is not the case, they could transmit sound waves from 8 meter upto 30 meters varying from model to model. Which allows you multi-task and make your household chores interesting. You can enjoy your podcasts or music or follow the recipe while cooking in your kitchen when your phone is lying in your living room. Voice assistance: How fascinating was it to watch all those detective/ secret agent thriller movies while they are on run and getting directions from their computer savvy buddies. Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible….. Remember! Many wireless earphones comes with voice assistance feature which makes it easy to go around the places you are new to. You don’t have to stop and look to your phone screen for directions which makes it easier to move either on foot or while driving. Few things for you to keep in mind and compare before investing in a true wireless earphones :- Sound Quality Battery Life Wireless Range Comfort and design Warranty Price Gone are those days when true wireless earbuds were expensive possession. They are quite economical now and are available with various features depending upon different brands in your price range.

n the India Truly Wireless Earbuds are the most selling mobile accessories in these days. The latest reports suggest that wearables in India registered an 80% year on year growth with a shipment of over 4.2 million units in the first quarter of 2020. The rise of the truly wireless earbuds in India is the main reason for the uptick. There are many options for the truly wireless earbuds in mobile accessories like the smart phones having a lot of option in the Indian market from last few years. In our market smartphones makers like Samsung, Realme, Oppo and Xiaomi are already entered and launched their many truly wireless earbuds models in the many price options for the customers. In the last year, we had very less option under rs 5000 for Truly Wireless Earbuds in Indian market. But now many brands are launched in our market, and we get the many option for the TWS earbuds under the rs 5000. Hammer is India's first athleisure audio tech brand providing stylish and extraordinary range in audio and fitness devices for a healthy lifestyle and comfort. If you want to buy truly wireless earbuds less than 5000, then you are at right place. Hammer is selling best truly wireless at very affordable prices in India. Hammer KO Sports Bluetooth Truly Wireless Earbuds Hammer Solo Bluetooth Truly Wireless Earbuds Hammer Airtouch Bluetooth Truly Wireless Earbuds Hammer Airflow Bluetooth Truly Wireless Earbuds

Wars are expensive, and the burden of supporting wars falls heavily on business, both directly and by taking spending money out of the pocket of the consumer. The vast amount of money poured out to support a war is permanently gone without bringing any economic return. After you have exploded a hundred thousand dollars worth of bombs, you have nothing to show for it except a hundred thousand dollars worth of bomb craters and rubble. Thus the gains made by munitions makers and government suppliers are more than swallowed up by the losses suffered by business as a whole. Those few who do make huge fortunes from war do so not because they are businessmen operating in a free market, but because they have political pull. And their profiteering from war harms all producers (as well as the consuming public) by hurting the economy as a whole.

Rather than just reacting to events, as transportation planners tend to do with traffic congestion, makers of, say, a patent system can construct one to reward creators or distribute intellectual property in ways that are not simply reacting to market pressures. We don’t only have to enlarge what is there. We can light out for new territory, and make new places, and markets.

While the assembly line created some meaningful advances in society, it widened the gap between the haves and the have- nots by solidifying a tremendous barrier to entry for manufacturing businesses. Factories and assembly lines cost millions and millions of dollars to build, and those resources were only available to large organizations and wealthy industrialists. That made it nearly impossible to disrupt or innovate without being associated with one of these entities. The assembly line also marked a tipping point for standardization and globalization. Prior to its arrival there was a strong emotional connection between the artisan and the product. The maker was close to the consumer, and that meant something to both of them. Standardized production over the twentieth century eroded that connection by separating the producer from the product. Producers no longer had to be skilled—they now only had to handle a piece of the process. That, with very few exceptions, systematically eliminated specialized artisan work. And the more efficient production became, the more financially beneficial it was to consolidate on the retail side as well, which led to what most call globalization, but I call global monotony. We entered the “Boring Age,” one in which different cities and countries all featured the same stores and products.

Mother’s Day was born. Combining the talents of the card makers, the candy manufacturers, and the florists, Mother’s Day became the perfect rip-off. Florists had always been in the van of advertising; they had also mounted a successful campaign to remove the unhappy phrase from newspaper death notices: “No flowers by request.” It had been replaced by the far more positive—and profitable—slogan: “Say Farewell with Flowers.” In a mother-orientated nation, no son, however cynical, could refuse to send flowers on that special day; the many florists in and around Wall Street—established originally to provide the carnation boutonnieres favored by fashion-conscious brokers—did a record business during the week before the bogus anniversary. As the day drew closer, the price of blooms soared—a practice perfectly understood in the countinghouses; it was known as pushing the price as high as the market would bear. In fact, candy manufacturers saw the price of their shares rise as a result of Mother’s Day.

The kind of rhetorical slight of hand that had become a staple of the conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue. Taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem's no longer the discrimination against people of color the argument goes it's "reverse racism" with minorities "playing the race card to get an unfair advantage". The problem isn't sexual harassment in the workplace, it's humorless "feminazis" beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem's not bankers using the market as their personal casino or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs, it's the lazy and shiftless along with their liberal Washington allies intent on mooching off the economy's real "makers and doers". Such arguments had nothing to do with facts, they were impervious to analysis, they went deeper into the realm of myth redefining what was fair, reassigning victimhood, conferring on people like those traders in Chicago, that most precious of gifts, the conviction of innocence as well as the righteous indignation that comes with it.

New technology or opportunity. When everyone started using smart phones, new markets cropped up for app developers, case manufacturers, and so on. But the obvious answer isn’t the only one: Makers of nice journals and paper notebooks also saw an uptick in sales, perhaps in part because of customers who didn’t want everything in their lives to be electronic.

Patients tend to assume that their generic drugs are identical to brand-name drugs, in part because they imagine a simple and amicable process: as a patent expires, the brand-name company turns over its recipe, and a generic company makes the same drug, but at a fraction of the cost, since it no longer has to invest in research or marketing. But in fact, generic drug companies fight a legal, scientific, and regulatory battle, often in the dark, from the moment they set out to develop a generic. Mostly, their drugs come to market not with help from brand-name drug companies, but in spite of their efforts to stop them. Brand companies often resort to “shenanigans” and “gaming tactics” to delay generic competition, as the exasperated FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it. They will erect a fortress of patents around their drugs, sometimes patenting each manufacturing step—even the time-release mechanism, if there is one. They may make small alterations to their drugs and declare them new, to add years to their patents, a move known as “evergreening.” Rather than sell samples of their drugs, which generic makers need in order to study and reverse-engineer them, brand-name companies will withhold samples, which in 2018 led the FDA to begin publicly shaming the companies accused of such practices by posting their names on its website.

IN the calendar of American economic life, 1955 was the Year of the Automobile. That year, American automobile makers sold over seven million passenger cars, or over a million more than they had sold in any previous year. That year, General Motors easily sold the public $325 million worth of new common stock, and the stock market as a whole, led by the motors, gyrated upward so frantically that Congress investigated it.

The so-called “Goulash capitalism” episode in Hungary clearly illustrated the problem. In 1994, shortly after the privatization of agriculture and food production, the country was swept by an epidemic of lead poisoning. After searching far and wide for the cause, doctors and scientists finally tracked down the source of the problem. Manufacturers of paprika—a staple of Hungarian cuisine—had been grinding up old paint, much of it lead-based, and adding it to the spice in order to improve its colour. The practice was so widespread that Hungarian officials were forced to order all the paprika in the country removed from store shelves and destroyed. At the time, no laws were in place to prevent such a catastrophe, simply because it had not occurred to anyone that this kind of thing would happen. Under communism, in which firms had no competition, no one had any incentive to poison their customers, and so consumer protection laws were unnecessary. In making the transition to the market, policy-makers assumed that producers would compete with one another to produce the best-quality paprika. They didn’t realize that producers would compete only to produce the best-looking paprika.

One company that manufactured resins used in exterior paints discovered this firsthand. By researching the needs of commercial painting contractors—a key customer segment—the company learned that labor constituted the lion’s share of contractors’ costs, while paint made up just 15% of costs. Armed with this insight, the resin maker emphasized that its product dried so fast that contractors could apply two coats in one day—substantially lowering labor costs. Customers snapped up the product—and happily shelled out a 40% price premium for it. Three

In the world of premium, flame broils there are basically two roads that the makers appear to seek after. We have the do everything models and the particular objective models. Do everything flame broils concentrate on presenting to you a wide range of highlights for a better than average taste of close everything a barbecue can do while alternate concentrate on things like infrared barbecuing, warm maintenance or self-cleaning. This Weber Summit show is a do everything flame broil that matches premium stainless steel with different cooking alternatives, great power, and a cost around $1899 on the lower end for premium barbecues. Weber Summit 7170001 S-470 Stainless-Steel 580-Square-Inch 48,800-BTU Liquid-Propane Gas Grill With a ton of experience in grill design Weber brings to market this heavy duty premium grill. Here we have four main burners pumping 48,800 BTU’s of cooking power over propane gas. It doesn’t stop there though the highlight of this model is all of its grilling utility. Features 580-square-inch 48,800-BTU gas grill with stainless-steel cooking grates and Flavorizer bars Front-mounted controls; 4 stainless-steel burners; Snap-Jet individual burner ignition system Side burner, Sear Station burner, smoker burner, and rear-mounted infrared rotisserie burner Enclosed cart; built-in thermometer; requires a 20-pound LP tank (sold separately); LED fuel gauge - LP models only Measures 30 inches long by 66 inches wide by 57 inches high; 5-year limited warranty SABER SS 500 Premium Stainless Steel 3 Burner Gas Grill Silver is a valuable mineral and also an extravagant color as the natural color of stainless steel why would you not want to go all out. With that in mind, we have this Saber SS 500 premium gas grill. This grill features a completely stainless steel build housing three infrared burners for precise temperature contro Features Constructed with commercial grade 304 stainless steel for lasting durability Uses a patented infrared cooking system for even temperature, no flare-ups and 30% less propane consumption Dual tube side burner is ideal for greater versatility of using woks, skillets and pots, as well as boiling and frying side dishes and sauces 2 internal halogen lights so you can grill at any time of day Napoleon Grills PRO500RSIBPSS-2 Prestige Pro Series Gas Grills Propane The grilling extends beyond your basic setup with a heavy duty rear infrared rotisserie burner and a side infrared burner for searing purposes so whether you want a succulent roast of a hibachi style feast, burgers and hot dogs are just the beginning. Features 80, 000 BTU's Six burners 900 in total cooking area Premium stainless Steel construction

I didn’t have the benefit of having worked under both CEOs, but it dawned on me how deeply a CEO’s persona and focus can shape an institution. Most CEOs are very good at many things, but they become CEOs for being superbly distinctive at one or two, which tend to be matched to a company’s needs at that time. Even CEOs need to declare a major. Welch is best known for Six Sigma—a set of tools to improve quality and efficiency—and his focus on people. Immelt instead emphasized sales and marketing, most visibly through GE’s branded “ecomagination” efforts to make and be perceived as a maker of greener products.

The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud: “The sheer number and magnitude of the things that went wrong or missing are too enormous to attribute to mere incompetence.” The Guardian commented, “What’s incredible is that the editors of these esteemed journals still have a job—that is how utterly incredible the supposed data underlying the studies was.” The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”97 Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.”98 Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way.”99,100 Cracking Down on HCQ to Keep Case Fatalities High Referring to the Lancet Surgisphere study during a May 27 CNN interview, Dr. Fauci stated on CNN about hydroxychloroquine,

The problem is no longer discrimination against people of color, the argument goes; it’s “reverse racism,” with minorities “playing the race card” to get an unfair advantage. The problem isn’t sexual harassment in the workplace; it’s humorless “feminazis” beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem is not bankers using the market as their personal casino, or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs. It’s the lazy and shiftless, along with their liberal Washington allies, intent on mooching off the economy’s real “makers and the doers.

The burgeoning government sales not only provided profits for the chip makers but also conferred respectability. “From a marketing standpoint, Apollo and the Minuteman were ideal customers,” Kilby said. “When they decided that they could use these solid circuits, that had quite an impact on a lot of people who bought electronic equipment. Both of those projects were recognized as outstanding engineering operations, and if the integrated circuit was good enough for them, well, that meant it was good enough for a lot of other people.” One of the major pastimes among professional economists is an apparently endless debate as to whether military-funded research helps or hurts the civilian economy. As a general matter, there seem to be enough arguments on both sides to keep the debaters fruitfully occupied for years to come. In the specific case of the integrated circuit, however, there is no doubt that the Pentagon’s money produced real benefits for the civilian electronics business—and for civilian consumers. Unlike armored personnel carriers or nuclear cannon or zero-gravity food tubes, the electronic logic gates, radios, etc., that space and military programs use are fairly easily converted to earthbound civilian applications. The first chip sold for the commercial market—used in a Zenith hearing aid that went on sale in 1964—was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself.

The games industry calls this “first-party content,” and it can be a serious investment. Over the years, Microsoft Xbox has taken this strategy to an extreme, buying a large number of studios and bringing them in-house. This isn’t a small outlay of cash—Microsoft now owns nearly a dozen video game studios, including Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, which they bought for $2.5 billion in 2014. It might seem expensive, but this is what’s needed to win in the video game console market. Sometimes, you just have to do it yourself. Reddit didn’t pursue this type of strategy, but it could have. There could have been a world where Reddit built many internal studios—one for their “cute” sub-Reddit community, another for sports, yet another for music—and hired full-time moderators as employees of those studios to create the necessary content. While this isn’t a common strategy for social networks, it’s also not crazy. In recent years, we’ve seen players like YouTube in video and Spotify in podcasts begin to license and create more first-party content to accelerate their services.

Judging from the dominant response to the current North American opioid situation—increased restrictions placed on the legal availability of these drugs—little has been learned from the alcohol-prohibition experience. As had occurred during the prohibition era, loads of people still consume so-called banned drugs, including opioids, cocaine, and psychedelics. Many of these people are forced to obtain their drugs of choice from illicit, unregulated markets, where there aren’t any quality controls. Thus, just as during Prohibition, thousands of people have died from ingesting drugs contaminated with poisons, impurities, and other unknown substances. Alcohol tainted with large amounts of methanol killed thousands of drinkers and left many others blind during Prohibition. As Deborah Blum masterfully explains in her authoritative work, The Poisoner’s Handbook, the U.S. government callously caused many of these deaths.3 Even before Prohibition, as early as 1906, federal officials required producers of industrial alcohol—used in antiseptics, medicines, and solvents—to add methanol and other chemicals to their batches so their products would be undrinkable. This policy was implemented to deal with manufacturers who sought to avoid paying taxes on potable alcohol. The Prohibition era brought with it sophisticated traffickers who obtained industrial alcohol, redistilled it to be quaffable, and sold it to the public and speakeasies. Government authorities were not pleased. Alcohol had been banned, but people continued to imbibe. By the mid 1920s, the feds were fed up. They ordered industrial alcohol makers to add even more methanol—up to 10 percent—to their products, which proved to be particularly lethal. Illicit dealers were caught off guard, and redistilling industrial alcohol required much more effort. Most individuals, certainly most drinkers, were unaware of these developments. People continued to drink, and the alcohol-poisoning death toll continued to climb. By the time Prohibition ended, hundreds of thousands of people had been maimed or killed due to drinking tainted alcohol. An estimated ten thousand of these individuals died as a result of the government alcohol-poisoning program. Neither accumulating deaths nor public outcry compelled the government to change its deadly alcohol-poisoning policy. This war-on-alcohol tactic remained in effect until Prohibition was repealed.

This is also the approach used by the two leading COVID vaccines that were made in China and marketed by the Chinese drug makers Sinovac and Sinopharm.

all this is quite a ways from auto makers being able to rig markets or force consumers to take what they want them to take . And the reason ; simply ; is that there is no accounting for tastes .... when it comes to dictating , the consumer is the dictator without peer

..allowing the music produced by marketing alchemists specializing in teenage romance to flood her thoughts via thing earphone wires.

The Global Plan’s most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability – successive US administrations amended it every time bits of it came unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: after Mao’s unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a variety of inspired responses. First, they utilized the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America’s allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America’s own market into Japan’s vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington’s policy makers. Fourthly, the successor to the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted to boost Japanese industry further. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialization of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link – a commercial vital zone in close proximity.

Here are a few examples of compelling vision statements: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience. Netflix

Now, of course, the pin-makers do not need 4,800 pins per day themselves, so what do they do with the surplus? They sell it. As the number of pins available in the market thus increases, the prices will decrease, which means that more and more people will be able to afford them. As division of labor spreads to other industries, the result will be the same: more and more goods (and services) available in the market, with ever-decreasing prices. This means more and more people will be able to afford more and more means to satisfy their ends, which means the overall wealth of the society will increase.

When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators from a problem, she often gains access to a bigger platform to influence change-makers—but she also adds to the vast pile of stories promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.

The right way to use the MACD histogram is: 1. Trade in the direction of the slope of the histogram. If the slope is positive, trade from the long side; if it is negative, trade from the short side. 2. Sell longs or trade from the short side when the histogram is above the zero line and the slope heads downward. This indicates that the bulls have lost steam and a reversal is in the making. 3. Cover shorts or trade from the long side when the histogram is below zero and the slope turns upward. This indicates that the bears are out of gas and the bulls are taking back the reins. 4. Go long with bullish divergence between lower prices and a higher histogram. 5. Go short with bearish divergence between higher prices and a lower histogram.