Monopoly Go Quotes

All of us are taking the night off," Wrath said abruptly. "We need some regroup time." Rhage snorted from across the table. "You're not going to make us play Monopoly again, are you?" Yup." A collective groan rose up from the Brotherhood, one that Wrath ignored. "Right after dinner.

If you were a game, Silas, you’d be Monopoly. You just go on and on and everyone ends up cheating just to be over with it.

Lucky for you, I’m not Monopoly Silas anymore. I’m Tetris Silas. All my pieces and parts are going to fit into all of your pieces and parts.

Horses are of a breed unique to Fantasyland. They are capable of galloping full-tilt all day without a rest. Sometimes they do not require food or water. They never cast shoes, go lame or put their hooves down holes, except when the Management deems it necessary, as when the forces of the Dark Lord are only half an hour behind. They never otherwise stumble. Nor do they ever make life difficult for Tourists by biting or kicking their riders or one another. They never resist being mounted or blow out so that their girths slip, or do any of the other things that make horses so chancy in this world. For instance, they never shy and seldom whinny or demand sugar at inopportune moments. But for some reason you cannot hold a conversation while riding them. If you want to say anything to another Tourist (or vice versa), both of you will have to rein to a stop and stand staring out over a valley while you talk. Apart from this inexplicable quirk, horses can be used just like bicycles, and usually are. Much research into how these exemplary animals come to exist has resulted in the following: no mare ever comes into season on the Tour and no stallion ever shows an interest in a mare; and few horses are described as geldings. It therefore seems probable that they breed by pollination. This theory seems to account for everything, since it is clear that the creatures do behave more like vegetables than mammals. Nomads appears to have a monopoly on horse-breeding. They alone possess the secret of how to pollinate them.

Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?” They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey. “Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.” My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap. “See this shoe?” my father said. Buckley nodded his head. “I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?” “Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two. “Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.” I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do? “This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon.” “Is that a dog?” “Yes, that’s a Scottie.” “Mine!” “Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?” “The shoe?” Buckley asked. “Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.” My brother concentrated very hard. “Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.” Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards. “Let’s say the other pieces are our friends?” “Like Nate?” “Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?” “They can’t play anymore?” “Right.” “Why?” Buckley asked. He looked up at my father; my father flinched. “Why?” my brother asked again. My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is”. He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back. “Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?” Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right. My father nodded. "You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not really understand. Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn up.

we went to a church that had missionaries who'd come back once a year from Fiji & give talks. I remember one of them saying it was very hard work telling people they were going to lose their everlasting souls if they didn't shape up. I pictured people sitting on the beach listening to this sweaty man all dressed in black telling them they were going to burn in hell & them thinking this was good fun, these scary stories this guy was telling them & afterwards, they'd all go home & eat mango & fish & they'd play Monopoly & laugh & laugh & they'd go to bed & wake up the next day & do it all again.

Poverty is not caused by men and women getting married; it's not caused by machinery; it's not caused by "over-production"; it's not caused by drink or laziness; and it's not caused by "over-population". It's caused by Private Monopoly. That is the present system. They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless the had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. Even as you think at present that it's right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: "It's Their Land," "It's Their Water," "It's Their Coal," "It's Their Iron," so you would say "It's Their Air," "These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?" And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on "Christian Duty" in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers. And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of th gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you'll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to "justice" in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.

You're a rule person," he said. "My sister was a cheater. It sort of became necessary." "She cheated at this game?" "She cheated ateverything ," I said. "When we played Monopoly, she always insisted on being banker, then helped herself to multiple loans and 'service fees' for every real estate transaction. I was, like, ten or eleven before I played at someone else's house and they told me you couldn't do that." He laughed, the sound seeming loud in all the quiet. I felt myself smiling, remembering. "During staring contests," I said, "she always blinked.Always . But then she'd swear up and down she hadn't, and make you go again, and again. And when we played Truth, she lied. Blatantly.

I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Go away,” I say. He raises his hands in surrender and takes a step back. “This far?” “Farther.” Another step. “Better?” “Yes,” I smart. Silas grins. “I don’t know myself well, but I can tell I have a lot of game.” “Oh, please,” I say. “If you were a game, Silas, you’d be Monopoly. You just go on and on and everyone ends up cheating just to be over with it.” He’s quiet for a minute. I feel bad for saying something so awkward even if it was a joke. “You’re probably right,” he laughs. “That’s why you cheated on me with that asshat, Brian. Lucky for you, I’m not Monopoly Silas anymore. I’m Tetris Silas. All my pieces and parts are going to fit into all of your pieces and parts.

Silas grins. “I don’t know myself well, but I can tell I have a lot of game." Oh, please,” I say. “If you were a game, Silas, you’d be Monopoly. You just go on and on and everyone ends up cheating just to be over with it.

It's all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.

Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the “leap” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.

A valid and comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the existence of a clique whose members would share the Leader’s monopoly of knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all means.

David and Eva kissed again, their eyes telegraphing something about how it would be later that night when they were alone. Then Eva took Magnus' hand and they walked off, waving one last time. David remained on the sidewalk, watching them. What if I never see them again... The usual fear gripped him. God had been too good to him, there'd been a mistake, he had got more than he deserved. Now it would all be taken away. Eva and Magnus disappeared around the corner and an impulse told him to run after them, stop them. Say, "Come on. Let's go home. We'll watch Shrek, we'll play Monopoly, we...can't let ourselves be separated." The usual fears, but worse than usual.

g) Time it takes to reinvent yourself: five years. Here’s a description of the five years: Year One: You’re flailing and reading everything and just starting to do. Year Two: You know who you need to talk to and network with. You’re doing every day. You finally know what the Monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors. Year Three: You’re good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet. Year Four: You’re making a good living, and you can quit your day job. Year Five: You’re making wealth. Sometimes you get frustrated in years one through four. You say, “Why isn’t it happening yet?” That’s okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field.

There’s a Monopoly game going on in the day room. They’ve been at it for three days,

How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn’t the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English—or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body. But it’s not really possible to adopt a stance of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don’t really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite rightly, some take me up on it. I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too. And yet I had absolutely invited the question. Telling someone else, with deliberate realism, that once I’d had a few more scans and treatments I might be told by the doctors that things from now on could be mainly a matter of “management,” I again had the wind knocked out of me when she said, “Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.” How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said myself. But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self–centered and even solipsistic.

If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more "miraculous" and "transcendent" than any theology. Actually, the "leap of faith"—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.

The Bolshevik theory requires that every country, sooner or later, should go through what Russia is going through now. And in every country in such a condition we may expect to find the government falling into the hands of ruthless men, who have not by nature any love for freedom, and who will see little importance in hastening the transition from dictatorship to freedom … Is it not almost inevitable that men placed as the Bolsheviks are placed in Russia … will be loath to relinquish their monopoly of power, and will find reasons for remaining until some new revolution ousts them?

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now... ...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one... The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reelection. The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it... Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that populations, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

Dispute resolution is too important to be entrusted to governments. When we accept arbitrary authority from a violent monopoly protection racket, the authority is soon used to make us submit. Then that authority is for sale to the highest bidder and courts are used to get us to go along with all kinds of disastrous policies.

Ambition is, if not actively corrupting, corroding. To simply be happy is not enough; to bake a really good pie or play Monopoly with the kids, go out for a game of tennis with a friend--not enough. The wanting corrodes. I thought I was a prodigy until I met a few. I reached for the brush, the light, eventually for the words, and perfection evaded me--even a shadow of what I could see in my mind evaded me until something simply broke, or rather grew: a membrane that sealed me to the past, away from the glassy world. I suppose genius is no picnic, but to be moderately talented is a chronic wound. 'Human speech is like a kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.' How do we adjust to that, what kind of answer is there to such disappointment? To not being able to make what seems so possible to make, play what seems so easy for others to play? To knowing that Flaubert, who occupies another planet from me, felt himself to be a dullard? To be stuck with kettles.

Furthermore, the experiencing self is often strong enough to sabotage the best-laid plans of the narrating self. I might, for instance, make a New Year’s resolution to start a diet and go to the gym every day. Such grand decisions are the monopoly of the narrating self. But the following week when it’s gym time, the experiencing self takes over. I don’t feel like going to the gym, and instead I order pizza, sit on the sofa and turn on the TV.

Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millenia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat... ourselves.

All of us are taking the night off,” Wrath said abruptly. “We need some regroup time.” Rhage snorted from across the table. “You’re not going to make us play Monopoly again, are you?” “Yup.” A collective groan rose up from the Brotherhood, one that Wrath ignored. “Right after dinner.” “I have something I have to do,” V said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” “Fine, but you can’t be the shoe or the dog then. They always go first.” “I can live with that.” -Wrath, Rhage, & Vishous

Lutch Crawford always talked straight to the point. That’s how he got so much work done. “Fawn, about the other night, with all that moon. How do you feel now?” “I feel the same way,” she said tightly. Lutch had a little habit of catching his lower lip with his teeth and letting go when he was thinking was hard. There was a pause about long enough to do this. Then he said, “You been hearing rumors about you and me?” “Well I—” She caught her breath. “Oh, Lutch—” I heard the wicker, sharp and crisp, as she came up out of it. “Hold on!” Lutch snapped. “There’s nothing to it, Fawn. Forget it.” I heard the wicker again, slow, the front part, the back part. She didn’t say anything. “There’s some things too big for one or two people to fool with, honey,” he said gently. “This band’s one of ’em. For whatever it’s worth, it’s bigger than you and me. It’s going good and it’ll go better. It’s about as perfect as a group can get. It’s a unit. Tight. So tight that one wrong move’ll blow out all its seams. You and me, now—that’d be a wrong move.” “How do you know? What do you mean?” “Call it a hunch. Mostly, I know that things have been swell up to now, and I know that you—we—anyway, we can’t risk a change in the good old status quo.” “But—what about me?” she wailed. “Tough on you?” I’d known Lutch a long time, and this was the first time his voice didn’t come full and easy. “Fawn, there’s fourteen cats in this aggregation and they all feel the same way about you as you do about me. You have no monopoly. Things are tough all over. Think of that next time you feel spring fever coming on.” I think he bit at his lower lip again. In a soft voice like Skid’s guitar with the bass stop, he said, “I’m sorry, kid.” “Don’t call me kid!” she blazed. “You better go practice your scales,” he said thickly. The door slammed. After a bit he let me out. He went and sat by the window, looking out. “Now what did you do that for?” I wanted to know. “For the unit,” he said, still looking out the window. “You’re crazy. Don’t you want her?” What I could see of his face answered that question. I don’t think I’d realized before how much he wanted her. I don’t think I’d thought about it. He said, “I don’t want her so badly I’d commit murder for an even chance at her. You do. If anyone wants her worse than I do, I don’t want her enough. That’s the way I see it.

There is something going on in America that is different . . . and particularly toxic for the working class,” which they ascribe to oppressive monopolies and American institutions that have consistently weakened unions and empowered employers, allowing them to profit at the expense of ordinary workers.

It’s not as if we can go somewhere else; the disasters on the moon and Mars colonies proved that. We have one very limited world, and although death has been defeated as completely as polio, people still must die. The ending of human life used to be in the hands of nature. But we stole it. Now we have a monopoly on death. We are its sole distributor. I understand why there are scythes, and how important and how necessary the work is… but I often wonder why I had to be chosen. And if there is some eternal world after this one, what fate awaits a taker of lives? —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie

Hola.” “How hungry are you?” “I’m actually already eyeing a pizza place,” Samantha’s smooth voice came. “How long do you think you’ll be?” “Too long. I think I’m going to order in.” “Don’t forget to feed your minions.” He smiled. “Yes, love. I’ve already told them to find some crumbs. I’ll see you in a few hours.” That was his Sam, professional criminal and champion to overworked office staff everywhere. “Okay.” She paused. “How’s it going today?” “Fairly well. I’m currently threatening to drop the Manhattan and buy another hotel instead.” She chuckled. “I’m never playing Monopoly with you. See you tonight.

There are three ways to approach secrets, you know. The first is what you find on soap operas and in poorly executed middle-school maneuvers. First, you uncover a piece of incriminating information, and then you use it to force a steady stream of favors or payment or behavior. The problem here is that, if extended indefinitely, the expected cost of compliance eventually outweighs the cost of exposure. Moreover, the probability that you'll lose your monopoly of your information increases with each passing day. Never, ever assume that you're only person digging for dirt, especially in Los Angeles. Vipers are measured by the pitful for a reason. The second approach is more effective: You make one, single very carefully chosen demand. And you give your mark just one chance. This was my usual MO. If this mark doesn't do as you ask, when you ask, you leak their secret. No excuses. No mercy. Brutal consistency is the key to credibility. Mothers, dog trainers, Israel -- you know what I'm talking about. But there's also a radical third approach: You reveal that you know the secret...and they you keep it under wraps. Do that, and they're not just going to tell you other secrets, they might even keep yours in return. And they'll think they're doing of their own free will when what you've really done is painstakingly aligned your incentives. That's all trust is, really. Some people are just incentivized by nature.

{From Luther Burbank's funeral. He was loved until he revealed he was an atheist, then he began to receive death threats. He tried to amiably answer them all, leading to his death} It is impossible to estimate the wealth he has created. It has been generously given to the world. Unlike inventors, in other fields, no patent rights were given him, nor did he seek a monopoly in what he created. Had that been the case, Luther Burbank would have been perhaps the world's richest man. But the world is richer because of him. In this he found joy that no amount of money could give. And so we meet him here today, not in death, but in the only immortal life we positively know--his good deeds, his kindly, simple, life of constructive work and loving service to the whole wide world. These things cannot die. They are cumulative, and the work he has done shall be as nothing to its continuation in the only immortality this brave, unselfish man ever sought, or asked to know. As great as were his contributions to the material wealth of this planet, the ages yet to come, that shall better understand him, will give first place in judging the importance of his work to what he has done for the betterment of human plants and the strength they shall gain, through his courage, to conquer the tares, the thistles and the weeds. Then no more shall we have a mythical God that smells of brimstone and fire; that confuses hate with love; a God that binds up the minds of little children, as other heathen bind up their feet--little children equally helpless to defend their precious right to think and choose and not be chained from the dawn of childhood to the dogmas of the dead. Luther Burbank will rank with the great leaders who have driven heathenish gods back into darkness, forever from this earth. In the orthodox threat of eternal punishment for sin--which he knew was often synonymous with yielding up all liberty and freedom--and in its promise of an immortality, often held out for the sacrifice of all that was dear to life, the right to think, the right to one's mind, the right to choose, he saw nothing but cowardice. He shrank from such ways of thought as a flower from the icy blasts of death. As shown by his work in life, contributing billions of wealth to humanity, with no more return than the maintenance of his own breadline, he was too humble, too unselfish, to be cajoled with dogmatic promises of rewards as a sort of heavenly bribe for righteous conduct here. He knew that the man who fearlessly stands for the right, regardless of the threat of punishment or the promise of reward, was the real man. Rather was he willing to accept eternal sleep, in returning to the elements from whence he came, for in his lexicon change was life. Here he was content to mingle as a part of the whole, as the raindrop from the sea performs its sacred service in watering the land to which it is assigned, that two blades may grow instead of one, and then, its mission ended, goes back to the ocean from whence it came. With such service, with such a life as gardener to the lilies of the field, in his return to the bosoms of infinity, he has not lost himself. There he has found himself, is a part of the cosmic sea of eternal force, eternal energy. And thus he lived and always will live. Thomas Edison, who believes very much as Burbank, once discussed with me immortality. He pointed to the electric light, his invention, saying: 'There lives Tom Edison.' So Luther Burbank lives. He lives forever in the myriad fields of strengthened grain, in the new forms of fruits and flowers, plants, vines, and trees, and above all, the newly watered gardens of the human mind, from whence shall spring human freedom that shall drive out false and brutal gods. The gods are toppling from their thrones. They go before the laughter and the joy of the new childhood of the race, unshackled and unafraid.

Because they have their strategy-the strategy of laissez­ faire; the strategy of individual versus collective effort, of appealing to that little bit of selfishness that exists in each person to beat out the rest. They appeal to that petty superiority complex that every­ one possesses that makes one think they are better than everybody else. The monopolies instill in individuals, from childhood on, the view that since you are better and work harder, that it is in your interest to struggle individually against everyone else, to defeat ev­eryone else and become an exploiter yourself. The monopolies go to great lengths to prove that collective ef­fort enslaves and prevents the smarter and more capable from get­ting ahead. As if the people were made up simply of individuals, some more intelligent, some more capable. As if the people were something other than a great mass of wills and hearts that all have more or less the same capacity for work, the same spirit of sacrifice, and the same intelligence. They go to the undifferentiated masses and try to sow divisions: between blacks and whites, more capable and less capable, literate and illiterate. They then subdivide people even more, until they single out the individual and make the individual the center of so­ciety.

Trump defended what he had said. “It’s not as if one side has any sort of [monopoly] on hatred or on bigotry. It’s not as if any one group is at fault or anything like that. With the media, you’re never going to get a fair shake. Anything that you say or do is going to be criticized.” “You need to fix this,” Porter argued. “You don’t want to be perceived the way in which you’re being perceived now. You need to bring the country together.” That was the moral obligation. “There’s no upside to not directly condemn neo-Nazis and those that are motivated by racial animus. There is a huge rift in the country.” Porter played heavily to the president’s ego and desire to be at the center. He said that the president could be a kind of healer in chief, consoler in chief. “The country is counting on you rhetorically to help salve the wounds and point a direction forward,” Porter said. The president could inspire and uplift. He could make this about him, the redeemer. Trump did not push back but he didn’t say yes.

Poverty is not caused by men and women getting married; it's not caused by machinery; it's not caused by "over-production"; it's not caused by drink or laziness; and it's not caused by "over-population". It's caused by Private Monopoly. That is the present system. They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless the had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. Even as you think at present that it's right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: "It's Their Land," "It's Their Water," "It's Their Coal," "It's Their Iron," so you would say "It's Their Air," "These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?" And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on "Christian Duty" in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers. And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of th gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you'll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to "justice" in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble

In the late fifties Romney had been a forceful advocate of breaking up GM. That, he believed, would make everyone leaner and more competitive. In 1957 he went before the Kefauver Senate committee on monopolies. Before he testified he was summoned to the Ford headquarters by Henry Ford and Ernie Breech, the chairman of the company, who were nervous about what he was going to say and wanted to get some idea of his thrust. Romney explained what he wanted: the breaking up of GM and perhaps even Ford. “But that would just make the competition tougher,” Ford had said. “If you broke up GM the rest of us would suffer.” “That’s exactly what I mean,” Romney had said. “Listen, I think it’s tough enough the way it is—it’s a damn hard dollar,” Ford had answered.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3

Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair...even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways. "So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out." Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average. Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same? Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you. So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher. The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.

Government cannot "restore competition," or "ensure" it. Government is monopoly; and all it can do is to impose restrictions which may issue in monopoly, when they go so far as to require permission for the individual to engage in production. This is the essence of the Society of Status.

Another great mystery for economists and central bankers is why businesses are not investing more. It is a puzzle why they're returning almost all cash to shareholders rather than doing more research and development or spending it on new factories and equipment. Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard economics professor, shares the view with the 1930s economist Alvin Hansen that we're experiencing a “secular stagnation.” Supposedly, the economies of the industrial world suffer from “an imbalance resulting from an increasing propensity to save and a decreasing propensity to invest.”59 This means that the slowdown is structural and not cyclical. He blames inequality and technology. “Greater saving has been driven by increases in inequality and in the share of income going to the wealthy.

It's the knowledge I spit that's detrimental to those powerful. Mental elemental procedures to the mass of ignorance. It's an on-going, never-ending symbol of punishment for the suffering is due to its lack of acknowledgement. Masquerades, gimmicks, and monopoly games; giving your heart to this money instead of Almighty, so it's suffering and burning of flames, a burning of shame. Playing the game can never leave you the same so who is to blame? Complete conspiracy, committed theft of inherited immunity, live a life of misery and taxing our energy. A straw afloat on water of deceptive ingenuity. A false replica of me, an enemy with my name but non-resistant so I agree with my adversary.

10. What realities are captured in the story of Lou Sanders and his daughter, Shelley, regarding home care for an aging and increasingly frail parent? What conflicts did Shelley face between her intentions and the practical needs of the family and herself? What does the book illustrate about the universal nature of this struggle in families around the globe? 11. A key concept that emerges from the author’s interviews is “home.” Much more than just the place where you go to bed at night, home evokes a set of values and freedoms for many as they face old age. As you consider the life you want lead in old age, what does home mean to you? 12. Reading about Bill Thomas’s Eden Alternative in Chapter 5, what came to mind when he outlined the Three Plagues of nursing home existence: boredom, loneliness, and helplessness? What do you think matters most when you envision eldercare? 13. What can be learned from the medical treatment choices that were made in the final days of Sara Monopoli’s life? 14. What are your feelings about hospice care? When is the appropriate time to introduce hospice in the treatment of those with life-threatening illness?

Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to limit their residence.” My companion glanced at me quizzically. “The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears nearby.” I silently agreed, recalling my prayer in the Benares hermitage, followed by the meeting with Sri Yukteswar in a crowded lane. “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?” “Yes.” I reflected that this saint descended from the general to the particular with disconcerting speed. “That is your cave.” The yogi bestowed on me a gaze of illumination which I have never forgotten. “That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.” His simple words instantaneously banished my life-long obsession for the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the monticolous dreams of eternal snows. “Young sir, your divine thirst is laudable. I feel great love for you.” Ram Gopal took my hand and led me to a quaint hamlet. The adobe houses were covered with coconut leaves and adorned with rustic entrances. The saint seated me on the umbrageous bamboo platform of his small cottage. After giving me sweetened lime juice and a piece of rock candy, he entered his patio and assumed the lotus posture. In about four hours, I opened my meditative eyes and saw that the moonlit figure of the yogi was still motionless. As I was sternly reminding my stomach that man does not live by bread alone, Ram Gopal approached me. “I see you are famished; food will be ready soon.” A fire was kindled under a clay oven on the patio; rice and dal were quickly served on large banana leaves. My host courteously refused my aid in all cooking chores. ‘The guest is God,’ a Hindu proverb, has commanded devout observance from time immemorial. In my later world travels, I was charmed to see that a similar respect for visitors is manifested in rural sections of many countries. The city dweller finds the keen edge of hospitality blunted by superabundance of strange faces.

A peasant—a small landowner—resides on a small plot of privately owned lands, and engages in subsistence farming.25 As his margins of profit are slim, he can go into debt for any number of reasons: personal illness, crop failure, taxation, or the monopoly of resources by the state or private elite. His first line of recourse is to procure a loan, which he can only get at high interest. The high interest renders him insolvent, so he is forced to sell or deliver family members into debt-slavery, to pay off the debt (see 2 Kgs 4:1–7; Neh 5:1–13). When this does not secure the means to pay off the debt, he has to resort to relinquishing or selling his own land (Neh 5:1–13)—his means of production—and, finally, to selling himself. Thus, he is compelled to enter the service of the state or some arrangement of feudal sharecropping for the landowning elite.26

On Saturday morning he got out the Monopoly set with the boys, and they got launched into a tournament that went on hours. I remember at a certain point my youngest son, Shuba, landed his silver top hat or racing car on a square where Pete had two hotels built. Shuba had to pay out almost all his money. He flew into a rage, ran to his room, slammed the door screaming “I hate you all!” It took us 15 minutes to coach him out. Pete, on the other hand, was enjoying the game, not to win or lose, but to relax and have fun. It really made no difference to him what the outcome was, and in fact when my older son came through as the victor, Pete was delighted. In one sense, this is the essence of aging with wisdom. You still participate fully. You still play the game with gusto. You still build hotels. You still go to jail and wait to roll a double six. But you do all these things in a spirit of amused detachment. If you win, you win; if you lose, you lose; but you’ve learned that is not the point of being here.

And since one of the main purposes of social policy is to keep the population passive, people with power are going to want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to get involved in planning―because popular involvement threatens the monopoly of power by business, and it also stimulates popular organizations, and mobilizes people, and probably would lead to redistribution of profits, and so on.

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears nearby.

See, In India I am going to say as I am Indian citizen, yes there is environmental concerns everywhere in India but they seem to be tiny and can be tackled within 20 years. So either it is exaggerated problem or the real pollution data is not open source i .e - Government is indirectly supporting and/ or hiding monopolies. Because governments focus is only on farming practices where land lords are having too much lands and using mixed system of farming because of unpredictable weather and indeed it does pollute the soil but applying biological remediation will obviously help treat and cleanse them. Why biological remediation is not at all considered? Animal genomics is under ethics, ok understood but microbial genomics, plant genomics? See there is certainly environmental problems from industries that affect farming, But i visualize that it is to eliminate land lords to make complete manu smiriti India. And who polluted farming system, obviously fertilizers and who allowed it? Indian government! before 200 years was there fertilizers in India? Why did they allow it, is it because they wanted pollute it for the money they get from foreign giants! or is it because they wanted to pollute the environment deliberately and then they want to cleanse it so that they get good names and meanwhile while cleansing strategies applied, as a partnership they enter into the system and then they eliminate land holders and make them sudras again manusmiriti concept! Isn't it? Do you know something this manu smiriti concept never much happened in South India, yeah it happened only upto certain level not completely like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. You people have polluted the environment now just pretending to be gods of saving nature and after inturns slowly making manusmiriti India. Yes south has pollution, and we know how to tackle it, we have scientists, we have context specific reasons, we have languages and cultures to protect. Indian law says, every cultures have their own rights to preserve their culture. Yes world is one, I agree, Context specificity always remains same. We have problems yes agreed we resolve it, Indian government as a sovereign country, it your duty to support our work and question only when it is against law, humanism and immorality.

Steve Jobs strolls into the Apple break room one day in 1994 and starts making himself a bagel. The staff chew warily. Suddenly, Jobs addresses the room: “Who is the most powerful person in the world?” Silence. A few names are proposed. Bill Clinton? Nelson Mandela? Then, Jobs erupts: “NO! You are ALL wrong. The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business.” He continues: “You know what? I am tired of that bullshit, I am going to be the next storyteller” And out he walks with his bagel I found this on Quora – another great website for building up your swipe file.

Story 8: Steve Jobs Steve Jobs strolls into the employee break room one day in 1994 and starts making himself a bagel. The staff chew warily. Suddenly, Jobs addresses everybody: “Who is the most powerful person in the world?” Silence. A few names are proposed. Bill Clinton? Nelson Mandela? Then, Jobs erupts: “NO! You are ALL wrong. The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business.” He continues: “You know what? I am tired of that bullshit, I am going to be the next storyteller” And out he walks with his bagel. How to use this story I found this encounter in a thread on Quora.com. It’s a lovely scene that really engages an audience. You could use it get people hooked on storytelling. The fact that Steve Jobs held it in such regard helps people to recognise its importance.

You know Monopoly sucks and you still have like five more versions of it. Are you really going to miss the Bass Fishing Edition?

What really matters is that never before in history has America had a con artist as its chief executive and commander in chief. And we may be getting ready to anoint another in immediate succession. One is bad enough; two con artists in a row may be our undoing. These con artists are, just like their Boston counterparts, part of a crime network. This crime network is the Democratic Party, and its leaders are the progressives. For decades now the progressives have assailed theft in America, blaming it on the greedy capitalists. They have claimed a virtual monopoly on political virtue, declaring themselves the champions of justice and equality. Not only is that wrong, but the truth is the very opposite. The progressives are the real thieves, masquerading as opponents of theft. They are the criminals posing as the Justice Department. And they have, for the past seven years, actually controlled the Justice Department, turning it into an accessory of their crimes and an agency for going after whistle-blowers and crime fighters. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Holder, and Lois Lerner are all part of this crime organization, but so are hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, the envious, the resentful, the hateful, the entitled. These are the people who still have the Obama-Biden signs on their vehicles and are now eagerly anticipating Hillary. Together, they are “the criminals next door.

A GENERATION AGO, ALL UTILITIES WERE REGULATED MONOPOLIES. Consumers didn’t have to make decisions about who was going to provide telephone or electric service.

As the barriers that used to protect incumbents from the forces of creative destruction crumble and fall, once-great companies increasingly find themselves on the defensive. Turns out a lot of companies weren’t quite as invincible as they thought they were—and were overly dependent on customer ignorance, distribution monopolies, knowledge asymmetries, and other fast-disappearing sources of economic friction. In this hyper-dynamic, hyper-competitive environment, every organization is either going forwards or going backwards—there’s no standing still. Getting better is no longer enough; today, a company must be capable of getting different—of proactively challenging and changing the fundamental assumptions that underlie its business model. Problem is, the legacy management processes found in most organizations do little to serve the cause of proactive change. Building organizations that are deeply adaptable, that are innovative at their core, and that are engaging, exciting places to work—building healthy organizations—requires some deep rethinking about how we put our organizations together.

President Woodrow Wilson explained the dangerous connection between excessive economic and political power in similar terms, in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: “I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Oh, and another change from your system: our prisons are now privately owned and operated.” “Really?” West asked, frowning. “I thought governments in my time experimented with privatizing prisons and it didn’t work very well.” “That’s because those prisons weren’t really ‘private.’ They were still paid for by government tax dollars and operated as government-enforced monopolies. They didn’t have to compete to provide the best service at the best price. Of course they were almost as inefficiently-run as ones operated directly by government. “Now criminals can choose the prison they wish to live in, and must pay the costs themselves. This means that prisons compete to provide the best care at the lowest prices. They cannot abuse prisoners without being sued and going out of business, and they cannot overcharge or no one will choose their services.

Harl is a tenacious advocate for antitrust action against agribusiness, but he’s not optimistic that without pressure from consumers, the government will go after these huge monopolies that control our food. “There’s a huge amount of money and a lot of pressure applied whenever someone in Washington tries to do something about this,” he told me. “That pressure is applied in the form of messages like ‘Look, if you let this go on, we’re going to diminish our support for your campaign.’ When things get bad enough that consumers rise up, that’s when we’ll get another era of antitrust.” How much money is involved?

After finding Corpp’s devoid of Juniors later that evening, it didn’t take Lex and Driggs long to guess that their crew had decided to hole up in the Crypt’s common room for the night. Together they headed down Dead End and made their way through a darkened, narrow tunnel, eventually emerging into a small green courtyard surrounded by a block of rooms. As they approached the largest one, a heated argument between Sofi and Ayjay wafted through the window. “I’ve got ten hotels on the Conservatory. Seriously, you owe me, like, eighty gatrillion dollars.” “Not until I get my triple-letter score for passing Go.” “No way! You couldn’t remove the Charley Horse, remember?” “So? I still found the Lead Pipe in Park Place!” “Which you had to mortgage after Queen Frostine totally sank your battleship!” Lex attempted to follow this conversation as she walked through the door, but she failed somewhere around the time Elysia almost toppled over on the Twister mat. “Jump in,” Elysia said from the floor, wobbling way too close to the jellyfish tank. “There are a couple of tokens left in the box.” Driggs sat down on one of the many battered couches and dug through the box, removing a wrench, a top hat, a rook, a green gingerbread man, and a decapitated Rock’Em Sock’Em Robot. Lex looked at the game board on the table, a mangled conglomeration of Monopoly, Clue, Candy Land, Scrabble, and chess. “What the crap?” she asked the room. “Don’t touch the Candlestick or you’ll automatically lose,” Elysia warned from the mat, flicking the spinner with her free hand

if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.

Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the paper’s main proof argument, I faced immediate internal resistance. It was as if my mind realized the effort I was about to ask it to expend, and in response it unleashed a wave of neuronal protest, distant at first, but then as I persisted increasingly tremendous, crashing over my concentration with mounting intensity. To combat this resistance, I deployed two types of structure. The first type was time structure: “I am going to work on this for one hour,” I would tell myself. “I don’t care if I faint from the effort, or make no progress, for the next hour this is my whole world.” But of course I wouldn’t faint and eventually I would make progress. It took, on average, ten minutes for the waves of resistance to die down. Those ten minutes were always difficult, but knowing that my efforts had a time limit helped ensure that the difficulty was manageable. The second type of structure I deployed was information structure—a way of capturing the results of my hard focus in a useful form. I started by building a proof map that captured the dependencies between the different pieces of the proof. This was hard, but not too hard, and it got me warmed up in my efforts to understand the result. I then advanced from the maps to short self-administered quizzes that forced me to memorize the key definitions the proof used. Again, this was a relatively easy task, but it still took concentration, and the result was an understanding that was crucial for parsing the detailed math that came next. After these first two steps, emboldened by my initial successes in deploying hard focus, I moved on to the big guns: proof summaries. This is where I forced myself to take each lemma and walk through each step of its proofs—filling in missing steps. I would conclude by writing a detailed summary in my own words. This was staggeringly demanding, but the fact that I had already spent time on easier tasks in the paper built up enough momentum to help push me forward. I returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practice–style strain, but due to its intensity it felt like much more. Fortunately, this effort led to immediate benefits. Among other things, it allowed me to understand whole swaths of related work that had previously been mysterious. The researchers who wrote this paper had enjoyed a near monopoly on solving this style of problem—now I could join them.

The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses’ spoken legacy to the Israelites, which codified more rigorously the much looser and often contradictory injunctions of Leviticus. Or the Elephantine Jews did have the Mosaic strictures of Deuteronomy, and perhaps even knew all about the reforms of kings Hezekiah and his great-grandson Josiah making the Jerusalem Temple the sole place of sacrificial ritual and pilgrimage, but had no intention of surrendering to its monopoly. The Elephantine Yahudim were Yahwists who were not going to be held to the letter of observance laid down by Jerusalemites any more than, say, the vast majority of Jews now who believe themselves to be, in their way, observant, will accept instruction on what it means to be Jewish (or worse, who is and who isn’t a Jew) from the ultra-Orthodox.

An especially close friend inquired ‘is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?’ As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too . . . ‘Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.’ How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said to myself. But again there was an unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. -Mortality

If you thought your mind had a monopoly on screwing you over, you were sorely mistaken. Your body seems to be in cahoots with the boss upstairs and has its very own contributions to that lovely beast we call anxiety. Don't worry if you are one of those lucky people who seem to have anxiety that is primarily driven by physical symptoms. You're not S.O.L. We just need to approach things a little differently. Physical anxiety symptoms vary from person to person, but there are some that tend to be pretty consistent: ● Pounding heartbeat ● Shakiness ● Shortness of breath or hyperventilation ● Sour stomach ● Headache ● Dizziness ● Feeling of pressure on chest ● Sweating ● Feeling of choking ● Chills or hot flashes I bet you’ve felt a few of those suckers before. Maybe you’ve even had a panic attack, which is a sudden surge of fear that involves many of those symptoms and makes you feel out of control. Panic attacks and physical anxiety symptoms, in general, are scary as hell. I don't get to that point often, but I have been there before, and I've seen it occur in others countless times. When you have a panic attack, it feels like you are going to die. You might even WebMD yourself (never WebMD yourself) and find that your symptom profile is strikingly similar to a heart attack... I bet that realization did wonders for your anxiety. Here's the thing, though. I know it hurts, I know it sucks and it feels like you are going to die, but you will not. People don't die from panic attacks. It just doesn't happen. Your body is a dick, but it's not going to let you self-destruct like that. Even though the emotional pain and physical discomfort may be quite unbearable, anxiety will not physically hurt you.

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So what was the Bell System waiting for? Kelly acknowledged that the phone company would capitalize on the transistor long after “other fields of application” such as the home entertainment industries.4 The recent Justice Department antitrust suit, which was now moving forward, was a stark reminder why: The phone company was a regulated monopoly and not a private company; it had no competitors pushing it to move forward faster. What’s more, it was obliged to balance costs against service quality in the most cautious way possible. “Everything that we design must go through the judgment of lots of people as to its ability to replace the old,” Kelly told an audience of phone executives in October 1951.

The apogee of Progressive reforms came with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Wilson noted in his 1913 book, The New Freedom, “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Sure,” said Rearden easily. “If it’s production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces.” “Oh, but . . . but we couldn’t!” gasped Mouch. “That would be monopoly!” Rearden chuckled. “Okay,” he said indifferently, “then let my mills superintendent buy it. He’ll do a better job than Boyle.” “Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn’t do that!” “Then don’t talk about saving the country’s economy.” “All we want is—” He stopped. “All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?” “That . . . that’s theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment.” “You’ve been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don’t you see that you’ve run out of time?” “That’s just theo . . .” His voice trailed off and stopped. “Well, now, look here,” said Holloway cautiously, “it’s not as if Mr. Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man. It’s just that he’s suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it’s only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—then everybody will recover and prosper.

The more I learned about Pierce, the more curious I was about him. He flew around the world promoting crypto in a Gulfstream jet that he had spray painted with Monopoly money and the Bitcoin and Ethereum logos. He had mounted a vanity presidential campaign in 2020 with the singer Akon as his chief strategist. He wore loud hats, vests, and bracelets, like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, and spoke in riddles like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He had a tattoo of a scorpion on his right shoulder. He was, of course, a regular at Burning Man.

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.

You are eight years old. It is Sunday evening. You have been granted an extra hour before bed. The family is playing Monopoly. You have been told that you are big enough to join them. You lose. You are losing continuously. Your stomach cramps with fear. Nearly all your possessions are gone. The money pile in front of you is almost gone. Your brothers are snatching all the houses from your streets. The last street is being sold. You have to give in. You have lost. And suddenly you know it is only a game. You jump up with joy and you knock the big lamp over. It falls on the floor and drags the teapot with it. The others are angry with you, but you laugh when you go upstairs. You know you are nothing and know you have nothing. And you know that not-to-be and not-to-have give an immeasurable freedom. —Janwillem van de Wetering

Charles Darrow set a goal when he was in his twenties; he determined that he was going to be a millionaire. This isn’t all that unusual today, but back then, it was extremely unusual. Charles lived during the Roaring Twenties, a time when a million dollars was an enormous sum. He married a woman named Esther, promising her that one day they would be millionaires. Then tragedy struck in 1929—the Great Depression. Both Charles and Esther lost their jobs. They mortgaged their house, gave up their car, and used all their life savings. Charles was absolutely crushed. He sat around the house depressed until one day he told his wife she could leave him if she wanted to. “After all,” he said, “it’s clear that we’re never going to reach our goal.” Esther wasn’t about to leave. She told Charles they were going to reach their goal, but they would need to do something every day to keep the dream alive. What she was trying to tell Charles was this: Don’t let your dreams die just because you made a few mistakes in the past. Don’t give up just because you tried something a few times, and it didn’t seem to work. God wants you to press on past mistakes. The devil wants you to give up. Progress requires paying a price, and sometimes the price you pay for progress is just to “keep on keeping on” and saying: “I’m not going to quit until I have some kind of victory.” Don’t be the kind of person whose way of dealing with everything hard is: “I quit!” Esther Darrow told her husband: “Keep your dream alive.” Charles responded: “It’s dead. We failed. Nothing’s going to work.” But she wouldn’t listen to that kind of talk; she refused to believe it. She suggested that every night they take some time to discuss what they would do toward reaching their dream. They began doing this night after night, and soon Charles came up with an idea of creating play money. His idea was something quite appealing since money was so scarce in those days. Since they were both out of work, he and Esther had lots of time, and now they had lots of easy money to play with. So they pretended to buy things like houses, property, and buildings. Soon they turned the fantasy into a full-fledged game with board, dice, cards, little houses, hotels . . . You guessed it. It was the beginning of a game you probably have in your closet right now; it’s called Monopoly.

After Alibaba blocked external search engines, its marketplace became the dominant destination for shopping in China’s e-commerce market. It became the go-to platform for product search in China, a feat that neither Amazon nor eBay could achieve in the United States, where Google is usually the first go-to destination for shoppers

That’s why Airbnb focuses on facilitating easy search and discovery for its users rather than automatic matching. For noncommoditized services platforms, that’s the right way to go.

The failure of these B2B marketplaces is a sharp contrast to the one major success story in B2B ecommerce from the dot-com era: Alibaba. Alibaba took a very different approach from these other marketplaces. Rather than going after large, consolidated industries, it went after small businesses. This strategy was the brainchild of Alibaba’s founder and CEO, Jack Ma. Ma’s vision was that “the revolutionary significance of the Internet is that it will enable small enterprises to operate independently.

The importance of user-led innovation for platform businesses means that the traditional software company approach of building a complex, fully featured product before going to market doesn’t make much sense.

At the highest level of network effects, a platform encourages its users to go beyond self-interest and start taking ownership of the community. With both curation and collaboration, a platform encourages users to create additional value for each other by getting them to act selfishly. Curating or working collaboratively improves the platform for me.

At the highest level of network effects, a platform encourages its users to go beyond self-interest and start taking ownership of the community. With both curation and collaboration, a platform encourages users to create additional value for each other by getting them to act selfishly. Curating or working collaboratively improves the platform for me. Self-interest is a powerful motivator, but here a platform’s users become active participants in governing and maintaining the network rather than doing so merely as a by-product of pursuing their own interests. Wikipedia’s lifeblood is its community of editors, who enable the platform to operate as a nonprofit while providing more than 36 million articles in 291 languages

The five steps of the Network Effects ladder are a reflection of a platform’s ability to attract, activate, and empower its participants. Initially, a platform simply has to attract users to create connections. But to realize the potential value of these connections, the platform has to activate those users through communication. Once the network has been established and value is being exchanged, it can increase the strength of its network effects by empowering its users. By enabling curation and collaboration, it harnesses users’ self-interest to improve quality within the network and create new types of value. Finally, a platform can enable its users to start taking ownership of the community by empowering them to help govern the network. By climbing each step in this ladder, the platform builds stronger network effects and creates a higher-quality network. The higher you go, the more valuable your network will be.

If one really believed in the reliability and permanence of an international arrangement, such schemes for providing the authority with 'hostages' might be more efficient, even more humane, than providing it with bombers and shock troops. One could even go further and let the force have a monopoly of critical medicines to use for bacterial warfare on a transgressor country. As soon as it starts an epidemic, it send its medical units in to make sure that no one suffers who cooperates.

Sometimes there are hidden obstacles to scaling—a lesson that eBay has learned in recent years. Like all marketplaces, the auction marketplace lent itself to natural monopoly because buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. But eBay found that the auction model works best for individually distinctive products like coins and stamps. It works less well for commodity products: people don’t want to bid on pencils or Kleenex, so it’s more convenient just to buy them from Amazon. eBay is still a valuable monopoly; it’s just smaller than people in 2004 expected it to be.

If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create. Indeed, if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to become a monopoly.

A good place to raise kids. The truth is he just couldn’t stand it anymore. The incredible freakin’ boredom. Couldn’t stand coming back from busts, the stakeouts, the roofs, the alleys, the chases to what, Hylan Plaza, Pathmark, Toys “R” Us, GameStop. He’d come home from a tour jacked up from speed, adrenaline, fear, anger, sadness, rage, and then go to someone’s cookie-cutter house to play Mexican Train or Monopoly or nickel poker. And they were nice people and he’d feel guilty sitting there sipping their wine coolers and making small talk when what he really wanted was to be back on the street in hot, smelly, noisy, dangerous, fun, interesting, stimulating, infuriating Harlem

I think I better head to bed. Who won?" I squinted at the board. It was blurry, the little pieces swimming around it like they were chasing one another. I hiccupped again. "Me?" "Actually, you owe me two thousand dollars and a house on Tennessee Avenue." Katie laughed, starting to remove the Scottie dog, top hat, and thimble from the board. I yawned, my eyes flickering shut as I took spontaneous one-second naps between blinks. Somewhere in the back of my head, I realized I was being a mess, not at all the brilliant, responsible fiancé Chase wanted me to be. Screw him. I owed him nothing. As long as his family was having fun. "I hope you like fixer-uppers and accept coupons, Katie, because I'm broke as all hell," I snorted out. "That's all right. It's just a game." Katie folded the board and tucked it back into the box as she hummed to herself. She was so agreeable and docile. The opposite of her older brother. Almost like he'd hogged every drop of ferociousness in their DNA pool before he was born. "Yeah, well, I'm flat-out broke in real life too." I snickered. Time to go to bed, Miss Hot Mess Express. I stood up on wobbly feet. My knees felt like jelly, and there was a strange pressure behind my eyes. Knowing I'd be coming face-to-face with Chase made me break out in hives. I'd tried to postpone our reunion as much as I could, hoping --praying, really--he'd fall asleep before I got back to the room. "Not for long." Lori laughed. I laughed too. Then paused. Then frowned. "Wait, how do you mean?" "Well"--Lori offered me a one-shouldered shrug, picking nonexistent lint from her dress pants as Katie put the Monopoly box away--"you're going to marry Chase, honey. And Chase is ... well endowed." Katie choked on her soda, while I used every ounce of my self-control in order to not break into giggles. "Oh, Lori, you have no idea,

marginal ideas that would be produced if only they earned a few dollars more, then go ahead and insist that we trade with China and India only after they adopt our ever-increasing intellectual property terms. We looked at data, and we looked at theory, and then we looked at data again; we discovered that China and India are a lot of people, and that the great marginal ideas that do not get produced just because they do not make those few extra bucks are quite rare, at best. Hence, we concluded, we are a lot better off with lower intellectual property protection when the market size increases, not vice versa.

Digital natives and millennials seem more at ease with gender fluidity. In the last year or two, we have seen high-profile moves towards trans awareness and acceptance. Young men, particularly well-educated, metropolitan guys, seem a lot less afraid of appearing gay. Maybe the Department of Masculinity is losing its grip. Like those once unassailable high-street chains which suddenly go bust, maybe the Department will one day reach a tipping point where no one will buy its wares any more. As with many real stores, maybe the Internet is helping to break the Department’s monopoly. Young men are shopping around for alternative visions of the masculine role that fit how they feel. In the future, I hope young men can easily adopt a plurality of masculinities as easily as shopping for a coat.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: 'Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They'd mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who'd have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o'clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it's no use pretending that food wasn't looted.... All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn't get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years.... Me, I'm only a little black girl.' Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: 'Now the whole world is watching Watts.

Senile imperialism What we are seeing then is this: the highest stage of capitalism has gone past its own high point and is elapsing as a historical epoch – automation is undoing the economic relations that underpin imperialism. The productive forces now demand a higher mode of production altogether. Monopoly capitalism had a chance of surviving despite the turmoil it wrought 100 years ago because it was still in its infancy, when the law of value still had plenty of life left in it given that full automation was a distant reality. Today imperialism is old and senile with nowhere left to go but ‘home’, and highly developed automation has brought the expiration of the law of value into view. This is being expressed, even as the world economy becomes increasingly integrated technologically, through the weakening of ‘globalisation’, which, contrary to neoliberal propaganda, was in retreat before the emergence of Britain’s ‘Brexit’ from the EU and the election of Trump. In 2015-16, the G20 economies introduced a record number of trade-restrictive measures, at 21 per month.[236] More precisely, the rising organic composition of capital in developing countries is undermining imperialist economic relations. Over-accumulations of capital are now so great that it is becoming more and more unprofitable to invest at home or overseas.

The BCCI has repeatedly shied away from disclosure, citing itself as a private entity. However, it isn't completely private either, especially since it has monopoly rights over something consumed by a large number of people. It earns from franchise owners and television networks. They, in turn, recover their money from advertisers, who ultimately pass on advertising costs to consumers, built into the price products. Thus, the consumers, we Indians, pay for the BCCI. And since it is a monopoly, we have every right to question their finances. How does the BCCI price its rights? Where is the BCCI money going? The media and lawmakers have a chance to go after this completely feudal and archaic way of managing something as pure and simple as sport. Individuals are less important than changing the way things work. What needs to be at the forefront is sport; are we using the money to help develop it in the country? We don't have to turn Indian cricket into a non-commercial NGO, for that is doomed to fail. It is fine to commercially harness he game. However, if you exploit a national passion, funded by the common man, it only makes sense that the money is accounted for and utilized for the best benefit of sport in the country. For, if there is less opaqueness, there won't be any need to make influential calls or petty factors like personality clashes affecting the outcome of any bidding process. If we know where the money is going, there is less chance of murkiness entering the picture. Accountability does not mean excessive regulation or a lack of autonomy. It simply means proper audited accounts, disclosures, corporate governance practices, norms to regulate the monopoly and even specific data on the improvement in sporting standards achieved in the country. If a young child grows up seeing cricket as yet another example of India's rich and powerful treating the country as their fiefdom, it won't be a good thing. Let's clean up the mess and treat cricket as it is supposed to be: a good sport. Game of a Clean-up, page 50 and 51

In gaming, as in some parts of life, there is always going to be a sweet spot between perfectly stable and perfectly unstable system dynamics. The rich-get-richer aspect of Monopoly may produce bitterness and social friction. But on the other hand, no one would want to play a perfectly socialistic version of the game, in which all income is distributed equitably, no one ever goes bankrupt, and the game never ends. Likewise, a real-life economy in which there are no winners and no losers would not work because, as twentieth-century experiments with communisms showed us, an economy in which hard work yields no personal benefits is an economy in which no one does hard work. *

Government is, and of necessity must be, a coercive monopoly, for in order to exist it must deprive entrepreneurs of the right to go into business in competition with it, and it must compel all its citizens to deal with it exclusively in the areas it has pre-empted. Any attempt to devise a government which did not initiate force is an exercise in futility, because it is an attempt to make a contradiction work. Government is, by its very nature, an agency of initiated force. If it ceased to initiate force, it would cease to be a government and become, in simple fact, another business firm in a competitive market. Nor can there be any such thing as a government which is partially a free-market business, because there can be no compromise between freedom and brute force. Either an organization is a business, maintaining itself against competition by excellence in satisfying customer wants, or it is a gang of thieves, existing by brute force and preventing competition by force when it can do so. It can’t be both.

In the past, part of the problem was that this concept was applied to businesses that didn’t have any real network effects and very little sustainable advantage, even if they were to succeed. Pets.com and Kozmo.com are both examples from the dot-com era. But another problem with the emphasis on first-mover advantage is that it gives you the wrong ideas on how you should go about scaling a network. The growth-at-any-cost mind-set is a big reason why platforms that get initial traction often fail to reach scale. Both Friendster and Myspace got big fast. But they did so largely by ignoring the effect this growth had on the quality of their platforms.

It is a hallmark of all the cruellest ages of history that certain groups decide that they have landed on a cause that gives them a monopoly on justice: that a particular god has given them a special mission to eradicate sin or when their study of economics or biology have shown them one true path to an upright future – at which point there is no limit to the number of eggs that can be broken to concoct the righteous omelette. And by implication, the kindest stretches of history are those when a majority daily awake wondering how they might go easy on others because they are so flawed themselves, when a sense of scepticism and apology dominates every social exchange, when one is constantly charitable in word and deed from a sense of impeachability – and when people can always readily forgive because they know how much in them needs to be forgiven.

Yet by mid-year, the Party had combined apparent military invincibility with a monopoly of hope regarding China’s future. Mao and the men around him had fashioned a master narrative of national salvation, something the Nationalists failed to achieve throughout their long, bitter struggle against communism. The CCP promised the Chinese people ‘liberation’ – land for the peasants, an end to widespread injustices, of bullying at the hands of foreigners and of poverty and backwardness. There was to be a ‘new China’: a modern, industrialized country that the world would never look down on again. Such a powerful message overcame misgivings many might have about the Party’s recourse to violence in the countryside and the new curbs on individual freedoms it imposed in the cities. China needed to change; that was undeniable. It was also widely accepted. Thanks to the Communist Party, it was at last going to happen.

In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies, we’re really setting policies.”11 Sarver agrees. “I went into the job having never done any real policy work before, and I never realized how important policy was going to be. It ended up being a huge part of our time.” Sarver’s job was effectively to be the mayor of Twitter’s development community.

They kissed. “Okay,” Dooney said. “Now pay attention. Evil number one, competition. Evil number two, government. So let’s say you’re a respectable, all-American robber baron; you’re sick and tired of all the save-the-water, save-the-whatever EPA types, IRS types, SEC types, DNC types, name your traitor. How can you be a robber baron if you can’t rob anybody?” “Got me,” said Cal. “Retire?” “Uh-uh,” said Dooney. “Think vertical. If you’re fed up with government, you hike up your trousers and throw your hat in the ring. You become the government. You go vertical. You install yourself right up there at the tippy-top of the pyramid. Corporations, Cal—they’re people. Law of the land. Therefore you nominate your corporation for president of the United Capitalist States of America, that’s what you do, you do an acquisition, you buy a subsidiary called the presidency, you install yourself as commander in chief—you install Amazon, you install PS&S and yours truly—because PS&S is a living, breathing, bona fide human being just like you and me and Jeff Bezos—human rights, legal rights—and, bingo, the IRS is your errand boy, the SEC is your own personal masseuse, the EPA is the groundskeeper on that golf course of yours down in Florida, and, hey, if you catch any flack, tough shit, you fire the whistleblower and hire somebody with the sense to do exactly what you want, what PS&S wants, what Amazon and the USA want. You make this country great again. Because you are this country. Because you are great. And if anybody thinks you’re not, fair enough, you buy yourself another subsidiary, you buy a Congress, so then it’s your Congress, the PS&S Congress, and you scare the shit out of anybody who thinks differently. That’s vertical. That’s king of the Monopoly board. That’s queen of Sheba. That’s why the Pilgrims showed up.