Markets Real Time Quotes

[...] I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled. I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place. I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could.

Internet articles can be used to give direction to your research, but the real research will start after that. You can read The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Economic Times, or Entrepreneur as much as you want but these still can’t replace market research.

Ah," Gary said dreamily. " 'Free time.' I've heard about that. Don't fool yourself, Fire-Top. What with extra hours of lessons for punishments, and the extra work you get every day, free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight. We all face up to it sooner or later--the only real free time you get here is what my honored sire chooses to give you, when he thinks you have earned it." "And he doesn't give it to you at night," Alex put in. "He gives it to you when you've been here awhile, on Market Day and sometimes a morning or afternoon all to yourself. But never at night. At night you study. During the day you study. In your sleep--

Good market research would have made you aware of the real picture at the right time, and maybe you would have been able to write a different future because of that.

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain, You, at least, hail me and speak to me While a thousand others ignore my face. You offer me an hour of love, And your fees are not as costly as most. You are the madonna of the lonely, The first-born daughter in a world of pain. You do not turn fat men aside, Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones, You are the meadow where desperate men Can find a moment's comfort. Men have paid more to their wives To know a bit of peace And could not walk away without the guilt That masquerades as love. You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them And bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood. Your passion is as genuine as most, Your caring as real! But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain, You, whose virginity each man may make his own Without paying ought but your fee, You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions, You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger, Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive, You make more sense than stock markets and football games Where sad men beg for virility. You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less? At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive, At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow. The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned, Warm and loving. You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love; Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous. You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children, And your fee is not as costly as most. Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness, When liquor has dulled his sense enough To know his need of you. He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria, And leave without apologies. He will come in loneliness--and perhaps Leave in loneliness as well. But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions, More than priests who offer absolution And sweet-smelling ritual, More than friends who anticipate his death Or challenge his life, And your fee is not as costly as most. You admit that your love is for a fee, Few women can be as honest. There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone Except their hungry ego, Monuments to mothers who turned their children Into starving, anxious bodies, Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners. I would erect a monument for you-- who give more than most-- And for a meager fee. Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all, You come so close to love But it eludes you While proper women march to church and fantasize In the silence of their rooms, While lonely women take their husbands' arms To hold them on life's surface, While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and Their lips with lies, You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most-- And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain. You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid, But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you, The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you. You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain. You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war, More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred, More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories Where men wear chains. You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass, And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artist. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define there time. Here's to them.

More fundamentally than any of this, though, is their deep fear that if the free market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine--that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.

You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That's it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit - instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What do you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It's just part of the code that they mean "for a living" because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don't care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it's better luck. Never that. People are always in something. I'm in advertising. I'm in real estate. I'm in sales and marketing.

The truth is that wherever you go, people want ideas, want language, want discussion, want space to share and to talk. The Web is great but there is nothing better than people in a room together. I used to be a bit dubious about all these literary festivals happening all the time, but this last visit to Sydney has convinced me of how important, and necessary they are. There is a collective hunger for real things – a kind of self-administered antidote to consumerism and spin. Yes, people spend money, buy books, but it is not about redundant marketing or pointless shopping; it is about really choosing instead of being fed the lie of choice.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go, as were other people who hadn’t done anything “awesome” in recent memory. “He can be incredibly intimidating at times but doesn’t have a real sense for just how imposing he can be,” said one former Tesla executive.

Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. 'Attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive 'package'. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.

People are fond of spouting out the old cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure. Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power. The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.

In real markets, agents make bad choices. They are often ignorant, misinformed, and irrational. Yet, markets tend to punish agents for making bad choices, and they tend to learn from their mistakes. For instance, if you fail to pay your bills, your credit rating declines and you have a harder time getting loans. If you fail to do research and buy an unreliable car, you suffer from repair bills. In contrast, when people in government make bad choices, the political process almost never punishes them. Studies show that voters are terrible at retrospective voting—they do not know whom to blame for bad government—and so politicians are not punished for making bad choices.

Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was baking bread, she was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool. The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe exists in the fantasy of the male artist and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort, but the role of menial, unfortunately, is real and that she knows because she tastes it everyday. So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any piece of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again, the same question, just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year. You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity, or its expense, or its inaccessibility, or the extraordinary way which in it is marketed, it will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantine, the artist who had no ego and no name.

Paying attention to customer feedback includes looking back over the data, as well as listening in real-time. Show your customers you hear them when they take the time to speak to you.

App developers often rush programs to market, correcting flaws in real time, while aerospace companies do the opposite: test their jets religiously before a single customer ever sets foot

After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money. It is literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance.

A home that nourishes life embraces the little moments and appreciates the rhythmic seasons of life, including the time necessary to cook real food from scratch...It doesn't have to take too much time, however, with efficient menu planning and wisely planned trips to the grocery store and farmers' market. The payoffs are astronomical - better health, good stewardship of our environment, and setting a good example for our children are just a few of the benefits. It also fosters an appreciation of the ebbs and flows of seasons because you'll be using fresh ingredients that are more readily available (and of higher quality) when they are in season. If you feel too busy to cook from scratch, then I argue that you're too busy, period. Reevaluate your priorities and commitments. If you want to live a healthy, long life and to pass the same luxury on to your children, then you MUST take the time to cook real food

The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today’s world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.

Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921,45 is something that you can put a price on. Say that you’ll win a poker hand unless your opponent draws to an inside straight: the chances of that happening are exactly 1 chance in 11.46 This is risk. It is not pleasant when you take a “bad beat” in poker, but at least you know the odds of it and can account for it ahead of time. In the long run, you’ll make a profit from your opponents making desperate draws with insufficient odds. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure. You might have some vague awareness of the demons lurking out there. You might even be acutely concerned about them. But you have no real idea how many of them there are or when they might strike. Your back-of-the-envelope estimate might be off by a factor of 100 or by a factor of 1,000; there is no good way to know. This is uncertainty. Risk greases the wheels of a free-market economy; uncertainty grinds them to a halt.

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at that time, sooner or later life will show him its claws and disaster will overtake him in the form of illness, poverty, bereavement and there will be no one to hear or see him. But there isn't anyone holding a hammer, so our happy man goes his own sweet way and is only gently ruffled by life's trivial cares, as an aspen is ruffled by the breeze. All's well as far as he's concerned

In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist? Another reason for his indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“ Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. I’m still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope. Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey. The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Dwight Eisenhower’s first two years in office actually cut the budget substantially, though not dramatically, below the previous year. Now we have “budget cuts” which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year’s expenditures. “Cut” became subtly but crucially redefined as reducing something else. What the something else might be didn’t seem to matter, so long as the focus was taken off actual dollar expenditures. Sometimes it was a cut “in the rate of increase,” other times it was a cut in “real” spending, at still others it was a percentage of GNP, and at yet other times it was a cut in the sense of being below past projections for that year.

I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, “I would rather die.” I really would have rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship with Strom Thurmond. At least there is some reason to believe that Strom Thurmond is a real person. You know, more or less. But I never felt like I had much choice with Jesus; he was relentless. I didn’t experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old description has it, as the alley cat of heaven, who seemed to believe that if it just keeps showing up , mewling outside your door, you’d eventually open up and give him a bowl of milk. Of course, as soon as you do, you are fucked, and the next thing you know, he’s sleeping on your bed every night, and stepping on your chest at dawn to play a little push-push. I resisted as long as I could, like Sam-I-Am in “Green Eggs and Ham” — I would not, could not in a boat! I could not would not with a goat! I do not want to follow Jesus, I just want expensive cheeses. Or something. Anyway, he wore me out. He won. I was tired and vulnerable and he won. I let him in. This is what I said at the moment of my conversion: I said, “Fuck it. Come in. I quit.” He started sleeping on my bed that night. It was not so bad. It was even pretty nice. He loved me, he didn’t shed or need to have his claws trimmed, and he never needed a flea dip. I mean, what a savior, right? Then, when I was dozing, tiny kitten that I was, he picked me up like a mother cat, by the scruff of my neck, and deposited me in a little church across from the flea market in Marin’s black ghetto. That’s where I was when I came to. And then I came to believe.

But these assumptions could not accomplish much on their own. What gave them power, and made them able finally to dominate and reshape our society, was the growth of technology for the production and use of fossil fuel energy. This energy could be made available to empower such unprecedented social change because it was “cheap.” But we were able to consider it “cheap” only by a kind of moral simplicity: the assumption that we had a “right” to as much of it as we could use. This was a “right” made solely by might. Because fossil fuels, however abundant they once were, were nevertheless limited in quantity and not renewable, they obviously did not “belong” to one generation more than another. We ignored the claims of posterity simply because we could, the living being stronger than the unborn, and so worked the “miracle” of industrial progress by the theft of energy from (among others) our children. That is the real foundation of our progress and our affluence. The reason that we are a rich nation is not that we have earned so much wealth— you cannot, by any honest means, earn or deserve so much. The reason is simply that we have learned, and become willing, to market and use up in our own time the birthright and livelihood of posterity.

IF OUR SOCIETY ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but

There are so many great reasons to devote all of your time and effort to taking and marketing listings. The Millionaire Real Estate Agent grasps the incredible advantages of making, obtaining, and marketing seller listings their primary lead-generation focus, and they do so almost exclusively. Over time, they will hire one or more buyer specialists to work the buyer side of the business and concentrate their energy on the high-return, high-leverage business of listings.

You should buy property when there’s ‘blood in the streets’ – in other words when things become unstable, the value drops, and it’s a good time to buy because everyone is trying to sell. Eventually prices go back up when everything settles. When I got into real estate, there were plenty of properties for sale that were really cheap – and this was because the market had been unstable before – with the previous S&L crisis. I was lucky enough to get into it at the perfect time.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here's to them.

Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assesses the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.

If you chart the gambler’s fortunes over time, what you find is the gambler wins for a period, or loses for a period. In other words, everything in the world goes in streaks. It’s a real phenomenon, and you see it everywhere: in weather, in river flooding, in baseball, in heart rhythms, in stock markets. Once things go bad, they tend to stay bad. Like the old folk saying that bad things come in threes. Complexity theory tells us the folk wisdom is right. Bad things cluster. Things go to hell together. That’s the real world.

Most of the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods in New York City, especially areas like East New York, where many of the characters in Eric Garner’s story grew up, had been artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams. One of the most infamous had involved a company called the Eastern Service Corporation, which in the sixties ran a huge predatory lending operation all over the city, but particularly in Brooklyn. Scam artists like ESC would first clear white residents out of certain neighborhoods with scare campaigns. They’d slip leaflets through mail slots warning of an incoming black plague, with messages like, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!” Investors would then come in and buy their houses at depressed rates. Once this “blockbusting” technique cleared the properties, a company like ESC would bring in a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done. The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000. The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation. Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair. This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

In the real world of globalised finance, where investment portfolios for the major centres are combined, where the markets (stock, bond, money, real estate, government securities, forex and commodities) tick almost round-the-clock from Tokyo Monday morning to New York Friday 5 pm, via London, Frankfurt, etc, in between (and the digital books are passed at the appropriate times), tracking such practices as “round tripping” – discovering the real footprints – is going to be exceedingly difficult. It would be better to focus on tracing the footprints of the black incomes where they are generated, i e, in India itself.

Here are the three things it will take to funnel hack social algorithms: Follow each of your Dream 100 and spend 10 minutes each day watching what they are doing. Write down the answers to these questions: What are they posting? How are they getting people to engage with what they post? What paid ads are they running? During these 10 minutes, try to comment, like, and engage with as many things they are doing each day as possible. Notice the pattern of what is working right now and model it for your posts (funnel hacking). This will give you a pulse on what is working in the market on that platform right now. It gives you the ability to see in real time what the algorithms are rewarding today.

SHAKESPEARE What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more (Hamlet) There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his perfection only to die. In Shakespeare's early plays, his heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical background to the nation's glory. But character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare's range expands considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time. Shakespeare's earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how 'this sceptr'd isle' came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul, just as the voyages of such travellers as Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the horizons of the real world.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Mice and the Cat. Once upon a time, there was a house with lots of mice. They were fat and happy. One day a cat moved in. The mice had a meeting. "What should we do? The cat will eat us! Every day that cat sneaks up behind us and chases us back into our holes.” Finally they decided on a brilliant solution. They would put a bell around the cat's neck, so whenever they heard the bell, they could rush into their holes before the cat could eat them. Then one mouse said to the others, "The solution is excellent. Put a bell around the cat's neck. But the real question is: who is going to put the bell around the cat's neck?" The moral of the story is that we all know what we need to do (join and get started), but there is great fear in doing it.

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?

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature; especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind. I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with the men on night patrol, a mediaeval anchorite would have probably regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy. There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood, but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a moment with a candle flame.

That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.

The Mice and the Cat. Once upon a time, there was a house with lots of mice. They were fat and happy. One day a cat moved in. The mice had a meeting. "What should we do? The cat will eat us! Every day that cat sneaks up behind us and chases us back into our holes.” Finally they decided on a brilliant solution. They would put a bell around the cat's neck, so whenever they heard the bell, they could rush into their holes before the cat could eat them. Then one mouse said to the others, "The solution is excellent. Put a bell around the cat's neck. But the real question is: who is going to put the bell around the cat's neck?" The moral of the story is that we all know what we need to do (join and get started), but there is great fear in doing it. I know you want to start or build a business. Would it be okay if I helped you get started by putting the bell around the cat's neck and then you can say good-bye to fear?

The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.

I don’t know the answer, but I know that the fiscal cliff is real. It can’t be discounted like Y2K fears. In 2008, for the first time in my career, my clients were really scared. We are three years from the bottom of the market, and they’re still scared. “New home construction in our area is picking up, and my client in the business wants to hire more people to handle the demand. But what if the economy falters? He would have to let them go. At 70, he doesn’t have the heart to face that, so he makes do with less. “A New York client in the vending business wants to hire young adults to help him expand his business. If he pays them fifty thousand dollars, it will cost him close to ninety thousand after taxes and mandatory health benefits. It’s just not worth it. “My clients are suffocating under the blanket of excessive regulations, taxes, and the biggest impediment to growth and expansion, uncertainty.” Mac’s voice softened. “My biggest fear is that I don’t have the answer and I don’t know how to help them.

He generally traveled to Europe four or five times a year. The pharmaceutical empire he ran had research centers in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and huge laboratories and factories in England. It was always interesting coming over here, exchanging ideas with their research teams, and exploring new avenues of marketing, which was his real forte. But this time it was far more than that, far more than just a research trip, or the unveiling of a new product. He was here for the birth of “his baby.” Vicotec. His life’s dream. Vicotec was going to change the lives and the outlook of all people with cancer. It was going to dramatically alter maintenance programs, and the very nature of chemotherapy the world over. It would be Peter’s one major contribution to the human race. For the past four years, other than his family, it was what he had lived for. And undeniably, it was going to make Wilson-Donovan millions. More than that, obviously, their studies had already projected earnings in the first five years to well over a

Short-termism also dominates in the marketplace. The market uses a discount rate of 10% per year (or more) when comparing costs now with benefits in the future. This means that a benefit that lies twenty years ahead will be valued at one-tenth of its real value. In other words, a problem twenty years in the future will be worth solving only if the cost of the solution is less than one-tenth of the value saved. It comes as no surprise to those who know economics that it is “cost efficient” to allow the world to collapse from climate damage, as long as the collapse is more than forty years into the future. The net present value of reducing emissions and saving the world is lower than the net present value of business as usual. It is cheaper to push the world over the cliff than to try to save it. The political world is not much better, given the short tenure of political appointments. Politicians can rarely spend time on agendas that yield a positive result only after the next election—which is normally less than four years away.

But I went on thinking about false teeth, and then about piano-keys and about that time the blind man from Martinique came to tune the piano and then he played and we listened to him sitting in the dark with the jalousies shut because it was pouring with rain and my father said, 'You are a real musician.' He had a red moustache, my father. And Hester was always saying, 'Poor Gerald, poor Gerald.' But if you'd seen him walking up Market Street, swinging his arms and with his brown shoes flashing in the sun, you wouldn't have been sorry for him. That time when he say, 'The Welsh word for grief is hiraeth.' Hiraeth. And that time when I was crying about nothing and I thought he'd be wild, but he hugged me up and he didn't say anything. I had on a coral brooch and it got crushed. He hugged me up and then he said, 'I believe you're going to be like me, you poor little devil.' And that time when Mr Crowe said, 'You don't mean to say you're backing up that damned French monkey?' meaning the Governor, 'I've met some Englishmen,' he said, 'who were monkeys too.

The truth was that the city was losing manufacturing jobs at a pace five times worse than the national average, and one of the reasons for its loss of 800,000 industrial jobs since 1962 was, expert after expert concluded, the decline of rail freight service. Several government studies had to concede, despite the bias toward the more glamorous and profit-intensive Trump-like development of these yards, that “a substantial market demand” existed for a real rail terminal at either 60th or 34th Streets. In fact, the ailing railroad industry was beginning to make a strong comeback outside of New York by the end of the seventies, aided by escalating fuel costs, which were putting truckers at a sudden disadvantage. A West Side terminal at either of the Trump yards would not only have positioned the city to take advantage of this economic shift, it would also have dramatically reduced truckload traffic through clogged Manhattan streets. Trump’s simultaneous hold on both of the potential terminal sites for almost half a decade may have been a fatal blow to a manufacturing revival in New York.

ONCE, a youth went to see a wise man, and said to him: “I have come seeking advice, for I am tormented by feelings of worthlessness and no longer wish to live. Everyone tells me that I am a failure and a fool. I beg you, Master, help me!” The wise man glanced at the youth, and answered hurriedly: “Forgive me, but I am very busy right now and cannot help you. There is one urgent matter in particular which I need to attend to...”—and here he stopped, for a moment, thinking, then added: “But if you agree to help me, I will happily return the favor.” “Of...of course, Master!” muttered the youth, noting bitterly that yet again his concerns had been dismissed as unimportant. “Good,” said the wise man, and took off a small ring with a beautiful gem from his finger. “Take my horse and go to the market square! I urgently need to sell this ring in order to pay off a debt. Try to get a decent price for it, and do not settle for anything less than one gold coin! Go right now, and come back as quick as you can!” The youth took the ring and galloped off. When he arrived at the market square, he showed it to the various traders, who at first examined it with close interest. But no sooner had they heard that it would sell only in exchange for gold than they completely lost interest. Some of the traders laughed openly at the boy; others simply turned away. Only one aged merchant was decent enough to explain to him that a gold coin was too high a price to pay for such a ring, and that he was more likely to be offered only copper, or at best, possibly silver. When he heard these words, the youth became very upset, for he remembered the old man’s instruction not to accept anything less than gold. Having already gone through the whole market looking for a buyer among hundreds of people, he saddled the horse and set off. Feeling thoroughly depressed by his failure, he returned to see the wise man. “Master, I was unable to carry out your request,” he said. “At best I would have been able to get a couple of silver coins, but you told me not to agree to anything less than gold! But they told me that this ring is not worth that much.” “That’s a very important point, my boy!” the wise man responded. “Before trying to sell a ring, it would not be a bad idea to establish how valuable it really is! And who can do that better than a jeweler? Ride over to him and find out what his price is. Only do not sell it to him, regardless of what he offers you! Instead, come back to me straightaway.” The young man once more leapt up on to the horse and set off to see the jeweler. The latter examined the ring through a magnifying glass for a long time, then weighed it on a set of tiny scales. Finally, he turned to the youth and said: “Tell your master that right now I cannot give him more than 58 gold coins for it. But if he gives me some time, I will buy the ring for 70.” “70 gold coins?!” exclaimed the youth. He laughed, thanked the jeweler and rushed back at full speed to the wise man. When the latter heard the story from the now animated youth, he told him: “Remember, my boy, that you are like this ring. Precious, and unique! And only a real expert can appreciate your true value. So why are you wasting your time wandering through the market and heeding the opinion of any old fool?

Frank O’Brien is the founder of Conversations, a marketing services company based in New York that has been named to the Inc. 500/5000 List of “America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.” In response to the frenetic pace of today’s workplace he has initiated a radical practice. Once a month he gathers each employee of his fifty-person company into a room for a full day. Phones are prohibited. E-mail is outlawed. There is no agenda. The purpose of the meeting is simply to escape to think and to talk. Mind you, he doesn’t hold this meeting on the middle Friday of the month, when productivity might be sluggish and people aren’t getting any “real work” done anyway. He holds this daylong meeting on the first Monday of the month. The practice isn’t just an internal discipline either: even his clients know not to expect a response on this “Do-Not-Call-Monday.”1 He does this because he knows his people can’t figure out what is essential if they’re constantly on call. They need space to figure out what really matters. He wrote: “I think it’s critical to set aside time to take a breath, look around, and think. You need that level of clarity in order to innovate and grow.

When I started in real estate, despite high ambition, I was constrained by the same 24 hours as everyone else. My early success came from a grueling schedule, long hours, and the high price of near burn-out. In self-defense, I devised a system that featured direct marketing in place of traditional prospecting plus a highly effective team, with all the non-rainmaker tasks delegated to them. This took me to the top of the profession, twice #1 in RE/MAX worldwide in commissions earned, and 15 years as one of the top agents—working less hours than most. While an active agent, I consistently sold over 500 homes a year, even while starting and developing a second business, training and coaching more millionaire agents than any other coach. Without the inspiration of Dan Kennedy’s direct marketing methods and his extraordinary, extreme time-management philosophy, these achievements simply would not have been possible. LEVERAGING yourself, by media in place of manual labor, and with other people is very intimidating to most real estate agents and to most small businesspeople. It frankly is not easy to get right, but it is the quantum leap that uniquely and simultaneously lifts income and supports a great lifestyle. —CRAIG PROCTOR, CRAIGPROCTOR.COM

When Joe and I went to meet Goldman’s real estate team, though, we found they had a different view of the risks of this deal. Goldman wanted to bid as low as possible to avoid overpaying. For me, the biggest risk was not offering enough and missing out on a tremendous opportunity. I wanted to make sure we beat Bankers Trust’s expected bid. You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price.

With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us. We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have. We're desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are. The objects that are supposed to represent our qualities become our qualities themselves. There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom and energy. When people say something is impossible, they have already decided that they don't want to do it. Differentiate between things you want and things you need. Leave your unused space empty. These open areas are incredibly useful. They bring us a sense of freedom and keep our minds open to the more important things in life. Memories are wonderful but you won't have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It's better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what's important today. Don't get creative when you are trying to discard things. There's no need to stock up. An item chosen with passion represents perfection to us. Things we just happen to pick up, however, are easy candidates for disposal or replacement. As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren't likely to want more. Our homes aren't museum, they don't need collections. When you aren't sure that you really want to part with something, try stowing it away for a while. Larger furniture items with bold colors will in time trigger visual fatigue and then boredom. Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste. The real waste is the psychological damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don't use or need. We find our originality when we own less. When you think about it, it's experience that builds our unique characteristics, not material objects. I've lowered my bar for happiness simply by switching to a tenugui. When even a regular bath towel can make you happy, you'll be able to find happiness almost everywhere. For the minimalist, the objective isn't to reduce, it's to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It's a tool. Once you've gone ahead and minimized, it's time to find out what those important things are. Minimalism is built around the idea that there's nothing that you're lacking. You'll spend less time being pushed around by something that you think may be missing. The qualities I look for in the things that I buy are: - the item has a minimalistic kind of shape and is easy to clean - it's color isn't too loud - I'll be able to use it for a long time - it has a simple structure - it's lightweight and compact - it has multiple uses A relaxed moment is not without meaning, it's an important time for reflection. It wasn't the fallen leaves that the lady had been tidying up, it was her own laziness that she had been sweeping away. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. With daily cleaning, the reward may be the sense of accomplishment and calmness we feel afterward. Cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. Simply by living an organized life, you'll be more invigorated, more confident and like yourself better. Having parted with the bulk of my belongings, I feel true contentment with my day-to-day life. The very act of living brings me joy. When you become a minimalist, you free yourself from all the materialist messages that surround us. All the creative marketing and annoying ads no longer have an effect on you.

That’s why traditional religions offer no real alternative to liberalism. Their scriptures don’t have anything to say about genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, and most priests, rabbis and muftis don’t understand the latest breakthroughs in biology and computer science. For if you want to understand these breakthroughs, you don’t have much choice – you need to spend time reading scientific articles and conducting lab experiments instead of memorising and debating ancient texts. That doesn’t mean liberalism can rest on its laurels. True, it has won the humanist wars of religion, and as of 2016 it has no viable alternative. But its very success may contain the seeds of its ruin. The triumphant liberal ideals are now pushing humankind to reach for immortality, bliss and divinity. Egged on by the allegedly infallible wishes of customers and voters, scientists and engineers devote more and more energies to these liberal projects. Yet what the scientists are discovering and what the engineers are developing may unwittingly expose both the inherent flaws in the liberal world view and the blindness of customers and voters. When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.

the markets was much more fun than having a real job. As long as my basic living expenses were covered, I knew I’d be happy. In 1977, Barbara and I decided to have a child, so we got married. We moved into a rented brownstone in Manhattan and I moved the company there too. The Russians were buying lots of grain at the time and wanted my advice, so I took Barbara on a combined honeymoon–business trip to the USSR. We arrived in Moscow on New Year’s Eve and rode by bus from the drab airport through a dusting of snow, past St. Basil’s Cathedral to a big party with a lot of incredibly friendly, fun-loving Russians. My business has always been a way to get me into exotic places and allow me to meet interesting people. If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake. MODELING MARKETS AS MACHINES I was really getting my head into the livestock, meat, grain, and oilseed markets. I loved them because they were concrete and less subject than stocks to distorted perceptions of value. While stocks could stay too high or too low because “greater fools” kept buying or selling them, livestock ended up on the meat counter where it would be priced based on what consumers were willing to pay. I could visualize the processes that led to those sales and see the relationships underlying them. Since livestock eat grain (mostly corn) and soymeal, and since corn and soybeans compete for acreage, those markets

This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.

Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.

We stand today on the brink of economic destruction. The housing market remains stagnant. Unemployment is obviously far higher than the officially reported figures of 6 to 7 percent, which factor in only those filing for unemployment benefits. As I was completing this book, there were alarming reports disseminated by the media that a hundred million Americans of working age were without jobs. This amounts to a staggering true unemployment rate of 36.3 percent. While some of those are willfully unemployed, such as stay-at-home parents, retirees, and high school students, there is no question that the real rate must still be at least somewhere in the HIDDEN HISTORY 4 25-percent range. Student loan debt is quickly surpassing credit card debt in volume. The cost of living continues to surge, while the vast majority of American workers receive little or no yearly wage increase. Our industry has practically left our shores, leaving us incapable of manufacturing anything of substance. Although the US population increased by 10 percent during the first decade of the twenty-first century, 5,500,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the same time period. The sad reality is America doesn’t make much of anything anymore. The income disparity has grown to such an extent that the richest four hundred citizens presently possess more aggregate wealth than the bottom fifty percent of all Americans combined. If present trends continue, the United States is rapidly on the way to Third World nation status.

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

When examining the history of any human network, it is therefore advisable to stop from time to time and look at things from the perspective of some real entity. How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’ When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the euro loses its value, the euro doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality. Of course suffering might well be caused by our belief in fictions. For example, belief in national and religious myths might cause the outbreak of war, in which millions lose their homes, their limbs and even their lives. The cause of war is fictional, but the suffering is 100 per cent real. This is exactly why we should strive to distinguish fiction from reality. Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

This is why, from this point on, no debt will be paid off. It can at best be bought back at a knock-down price and put back on to a debt market — the public sector borrowing requirement, the national debt, th e world deb t — having once again become an exchange value. It is unlikely the debt will ever be called in, and this is what gives it its incalculable value. For, suspended as it is in this way, it is our only insurance against time. Unlike the countdown, whic h signifies th e exhaustion of time, the indefinitely deferred debt is our guarantee that time itself is inexhaustible. Now, we very much need assuring about time in this way at the very poin t whe n the future itself is tendin g to be wholly consume d in real time . Clearing the debt, balancing up the books, writing off Third World debt — these are things not even to be contemplated. It is only the disequilibrium of the debt, its proliferation, its promise of infinity, which keeps us going. The global, planetary debt clearly has no meaning in traditional terms of obligation and credit. On the other hand, it is our true collective claim on each other — a symbolic claim, by whic h persons, companies and nations find themselves bound to one another through lack. Each is bound to the other (even the banks) by their virtual bankruptcy , as accomplices are bound by their crime. All assured of existing for each other in the shade of a debt which cannot be settled or written off, since the repayment of the accumulated world debt would take far more than the funds available. The only sense of it, then, is to bind all civilized human beings into the same destiny as creditors. Just as nuclear weapons, stockpiled across the world to a point of considerable planetary overkill, have no other meaning than to bind all human beings into a single destiny of threat and deterrence.

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

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

In my generation we did a lot of pleasure chasing—we, the generation responsible for today’s twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and forty-year-olds. Before they came into our lives, we were on a pleasure binge, and the need for immediate gratification passed through us to our children. When I got out of the Army in 1944, the guys who were being discharged with me were mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty. We came home to a country that was in great shape in terms of industrial capacity. As the victors, we decided to spread the good fortune around, and we did all kinds of wonderful things—but it wasn’t out of selfless idealism, let me assure you. Take the Marshall Plan, which we implemented at that time. It rebuilt Europe, yes, but it also enabled those war ruined countries to buy from us. The incredible, explosive economic prosperity that resulted just went wild. It was during that period that the pleasure principle started feeding on itself. One generation later it was the sixties, and those twenty-eight-year-old guys from World War II were forty-eight. They had kids twenty years old, kids who had been so indulged for two decades that it caused a huge, first-time-in-history distortion in the curve of values. And, boy, did that curve bend and bend and bend. These postwar parents thought they were in nirvana if they had a color TV and two cars and could buy a Winnebago and a house on the lake. But the children they had raised on that pleasure principle of material goods were by then bored to death. They had overdosed on all that stuff. So that was the generation who decided, “Hey, guess where the real action is? Forget the Winnebago. Give me sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Incredible mind-blowing experiences, head-banging, screw-your-brains-out experiences in service to immediate and transitory pleasures. But the one kind of gratification is simply an outgrowth of the other, a more extreme form of the same hedonism, the same need to indulge and consume. Some of those same sixties kids are now themselves forty-eight. Whatever genuine idealism they carried through those love-in days got swept up in the great yuppie gold rush of the eighties and the stock market nirvana of the nineties—and I’m afraid we are still miles away from the higher ground we seek.

When a country’s economy is in trouble—when it has a balance of trade deficit, for instance, and when its debts are mounting—and when the currency, therefore, is declining in value because everybody can see that the economy is bad, politicians, throughout history, have found a way of making things worse with the imposition of exchange controls. They run to the press and they say, “Listen, all you God-fearing Americans, Germans, Russians, whatever you are, we have a temporary problem in the financial market and it is caused by these evil speculators who are driving down the value of our currency—there is nothing wrong with our currency, we are a strong country with a sound economy, and if it were not for these speculators everything would be OK.” Diverting attention away from the real cause of the problem, which is their own mismanagement of the economy, politicians look to three crowds of people to blame for the regrettable situation. After the speculators come bankers and foreigners. Nobody likes bankers anyway, not even in good times; in bad times, everybody likes them less, because everybody sees them as rich and growing richer off the bad turn of events. Foreigners as a target are equally safe, because foreigners cannot vote. They do not have a say-so in national affairs, and remember, their food smells bad. Politicians will even blame journalists: if reporters did not write about our tanking economy, our economy would not be tanking. So we are going to enact this temporary measure, they say. To stem the scourge of a declining currency, we are going to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for people to take their money out of the country—it will not affect most of you because you do not travel or otherwise spend cash overseas. (See Chapter 9 and the Bernanke delusion.) Then they introduce serious exchange controls. They are always “temporary,” yet they always go on for years and years. Like anything else spawned by the government, once they are in place, a bureaucracy grows up around them. A constituency now arises whose sole purpose is to defend exchange controls and thereby assure their longevity. And they are always disastrous for a country. The free flow of capital stops. Money is trapped inside your country. And the country stops being as competitive as it once was.

Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.

Real-time marketing is not for everyone. To take advantage of it, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve through it.

The greatest challenge on the Web in the twenty-first century is to connect with your target audience in a way that enriches both them and you.

Investment In Real Estate Is A Worthwhile Endeavor Several factors has to be studied by any individual who is planning an investment in real estate. For example, if business properties are desired, the client should are aware of they may be targeting certain conditions that aren't typically seen with residential properties. Nonetheless, for the appropriate particular person, and for those who plan fastidiously and receive good recommendation, this feature investment will be highly profitable. Individuals looking for commercial properties can certainly find that there are numerous kinds of institutions by which to come up with selection. For instance, an individual should purchase a restaurant or lodge, or invest in a retail store. The consumer may also select to buy an investment property comparable to your rent amount advanced and make an income from leaseing every unit. Office constructings can also be a smart selection, as tenants will likely be seen reasonably ardmore three wheelock quickly. It's fundamental, nevertheless, to buy such properties in nearly anything that receives beneficiant traffic. Most commercial institutions fail if they can't appeal to a steady transfer of customers. Buying residential property is something customers may additionally wish to think about that these planning to decide on their investment portfolios. For instance, an individual may decide to obtain a dwelling that have been renovated. Sometimes called "handyman specials, " such properties will be repaired which can offered during profit. Fortuitously, usually they are cheaper than properties that are in good repair. It is also a possibility to build an ad or residential property can be an investment. Builders who've satisfactory money to finance exceptionally challenge made having a tract of land and fill homes for it on the market to the general public. However, as soon as again, it is essential to pick a location carefully, as it may possibly nominal good to supply homes for sale in a part of the country in which nobody wants to live. Purchasing the primary property one finds is rarely a clever program of action. Instead, it is always the most effective interest match investor to comparability store attempting to discover at a couple of home or business earlier than making a final decision. It will make sure that the excellent ill use made. It can be more suitable obtain authorized advice every time one is planning to purchase various types property. This is even if that the buyer must have assurance that the property just isn't encumbered, and he or she can even want knowledgeable to make all the paperwork regarding the transaction is legal. Finally, individuals planning an investment in real estate will find that it plan of action is sensible, supplied they plan with care and hire a reliable broker to supervise their transactions.

Balfour Beatty The economic crisis really galvanised us as a business. I think it accelerated a lot of things that were in train anyway and gave them a real impetus. We’re more aware of the need to be more revolutionary than evolutionary. We always knew we would need to expand into emerging markets, but since the crisis we are much more definite about how to do this. We have been much clearer about finding the right people and devising the right management structure, and how joint ventures and strategic alliances should be organised. It is all very deliberate and open – it is no longer a distant plan, it is under way. Richard Gartside Eisenhardt and Brown argue that the ability to reshape a business is critical in turbulent markets. It is not the same as traditional

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

A eulogy is often the first formal marking down of what our lives were about—the foundational document of our legacy. It is how people remember us and how we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years,” Ellen Dunham-Jones, Georgia Tech professor of architecture and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, told me. “And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.

original content Tweets with smiley faces receive 46 percent fewer retweets and 36 percent fewer favorites than content without the emoticons.

Though they did not instantly grasp the ultimate significance of the money market fund, Brown and Bent understood completely that they were making the first real assault on Regulation Q. Here is Henry Brown describing the moment of epiphany: “It was a frustrating time,” he wrote in an unpublished chronicle, of their disastrous first two years in business. (“Bent calculated that the proprietor of the hot dog stand at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street was making twice as much money as either of them.”) In a moment of desperation, Bent one day asked Brown:

The process of de-materialization of value is part of the general process of abstraction that is the general trend of capitalism. Marx’s theory of value is based on the concept of abstract labour: labour time is the source and the measure of value. This implies that, from the point of view of valorization, the concrete usefulness of the working activity is irrelevant. What counts is the abstract work–time, not the concrete contents of productive activity. In the sphere of the market, things are not considered according to their usefulness, but only in terms of their exchangeability. Similarly, in the sphere of language, words are exchanged and valued according to their performativity, that is, their pragmatic efficiency. It is not truth, but effectiveness, against which we measure value in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, as opposed to hermeneutics, is the methodology of social communication, particularly in the age of pervasive media: when information flows are pervading every space of the public discourse and imagination, simulation takes the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination we call the ‘world’. Signs are exchanged with signs, not with real things.

Think of how much time and energy people waste being frustrated by obstacles, when they could be putting that energy into getting past them.

But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system. P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins. In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.

Industry Guarantee Real estate I'll sell your home. Or give you $1,000 cash. Restaurant You'll love our food. Or the next meal is free. Sports therapist We'll stop your pain. Or we'll visit your home and provide a free follow-up session. Dog-walking service We'll be there on time, every time. Or you get a $50 bag of dog food free. Florist Free box of chocolates if our flowers ever disappoint you. Computer repair We'll fix it right. Or repair it free and give you $100 cash. Retail store Double your money back if you find it cheaper elsewhere.

Data on how such buyers affect the listed market are difficult to corral. But an InvestigateWest analysis of roughly 12,000 buyers who paid cash for listed homes in Multnomah County between 2006 and 2014 found more than 850 individuals or their corporate doppelgangers buying between two and nine homes. Those buyers were joined by the 26 institutional investors that captured hundreds more. Translation? Among the approximately 12,000 purchases, there were at least 2,750 flips, remodels, redevelopments and new rental acquisitions in place of new homeowners at the lowest price point of the market. Owing to the lack of transparency in real estate holdings — many homes were acquired by opaquely named corporations, and some buyers use several at a time — and to the tendency of equity groups to place houses in the names of their investors rather than of the investment company, that number is likely much higher.

Real-time marketing is needed to reach consumers with low attention spans and that are also inundated with content,

No big company loses to a little company if they are totally committed to winning the fight. There is no reason why mammoth companies like Barnes & Noble or Borders could not have spent real money and hired the right people to come at Amazon with everything they had. Barnes & Noble went online in 1997, but they didn’t go in 100 percent; they couldn’t have, or Amazon wouldn’t have taken over so much of their market. They should have done the same thing I do every time a new liquor store that could be a threat opens up near me—pound the competitor’s face in with advertising and marketing dollars (even if they’re not opening up close to me, you can bet I’m paying close attention to what they’re doing). Barnes & Noble should have come at Amazon the way Fox and NBC came at Google, when they developed a true rival, Hulu, to combat Google’s YouTube.

FROM AN OPPRESSIVE MARCH TO DANCING FREE Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9 If you’re an American patriot who wants to restore constitutional government to our land, who wants to see big government cut back to its rightful small-government boundaries, who wants a nation once again united under the banner of faith and freedom . . . well, we know we’ve got our work cut out for us. We may have big challenges ahead, but name me a generation that didn’t. There’s nothing wrong with America that our activism and some good old-fashioned election victories can’t fix. Elections are where we the people can fire politicians who don’t abide by the Constitution; who don’t support liberty, or the right to life, or the right of an entrepreneur to follow his dream, start a business, and create jobs unhindered by burdensome regulation and crushing taxes. Our mission is to take back our government so that it once again represents a land not of government subsidies and patronage and welfare dependency, but of individual spirit, drive, and initiative; not of government direction but of individual responsibility; not of tax-fed bureaucrats but of businesses meeting real market needs and creating jobs. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Patriotism, like faith, is for the long haul. We should never be discouraged, because God is always with us; and this is America, where anything is possible! Don’t give up!

Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go, as were other people who hadn’t done anything “awesome” in recent memory. “He can be incredibly intimidating at times but doesn’t have a real sense for just how imposing he can be,” said one former Tesla executive. “We’d have these meetings and take bets on who was going to get bloodied and bruised. If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast. He’d say, ‘I never want to hear that phrase again. What we have to do is fucking hard and half-assing things won’t be tolerated.’ He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you. He has to understand that you’re as crazy as he is.” This ethos filtered through the entire company, and everyone quickly understood that Musk meant business.