“
What's been important in my understanding of myself and others is the fact that each one of us is so much more than any one thing. A sick child is much more than his or her sickness.
A person with a disability is much, much more than a handicap. A pediatrician is more than a medical doctor. You're MUCH more than your job description or your age or your income or your output.
”
”
Fred Rogers (The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember)
“
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
”
”
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
“
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
”
”
Raymond Chandler
“
Much of clinician burnout is due to spending time writing notes, placing orders, generating referrals, writing prior authorization letters, and creating patient communication. In other words, burnout is caused by physicians having to generate output! With the emergence of large language models that are used to train generative AI solutions, these use cases will be at the frontier of AI’s applications in healthcare.
”
”
Ronald M. Razmi (AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors)
“
I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!
I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive.
Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!
I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers.
I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail.
But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant.
I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn.
I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity.
I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!
”
”
George Carlin
“
When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.
”
”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
AI won‘t be fool proof in the future since it will only as good as the data and information that we give it to learn. It could be the case that simple elementary tricks could fool the AI algorithm and it may serve a complete waste of output as a result.
”
”
Zoltan Andrejkovics (Together: AI and Human. On The Same Side.)
“
Living life as an artist is a practice.
You are either engaging in the practice
or you’re not.
It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.
It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.”
You are either living as a monk or you’re not.
We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.
The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.
”
”
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
“
Pareto's Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs
result from 20% of the inputs.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
”
”
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
“
A businessman who expects his output to be stolen, expropriated, or entirely taxed away will have little incentive to work, let alone any incentive to undertake investments and innovations.
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
“
Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How, then, can you ever create anything new?
”
”
Joe Dispenza (Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One)
“
The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.
”
”
Herbert Marcuse
“
Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
”
”
Jessie Burton (The Muse)
“
The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.
”
”
William A. Dembski (The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design)
“
It is always hard for me to share my creative output with others...It feels like I have taken a big dump on a platter and set it out at a party for people to view. I hope you like the way it looks and smells.
”
”
Lance Carbuncle
“
A good investment is like a good fruit tree. From its conception, it grows exponentially larger consistently and reliably. It’s required input in a small percentage of its output. It regularly gives back to the broader ecosystem, helping multiple other lives to prosper. And it produces an abundance of fruit for the enjoyment of its owner.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
Productivity is about turning valuable inputs into valuable outputs. Individual people are more productive when all the elements of the permaculture economy are at work in their lives. When individuals are productive, then businesses become productive. When businesses become productive, the nation becomes productive.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
“
there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.
”
”
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Time Must Have a Stop)
“
It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or " I hate" or " I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.
”
”
Anita Brookner (Look at Me)
“
The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.
”
”
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
“
Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
When people of similar frequencies come together, output is not a simple sum of individual work, but exponential. In science we term this phenomenon as resonance. Output at this stage is beyond any logical limit.
”
”
Ravindra Shukla (A Maverick Heart: Between Love and Life)
“
Is it true that existence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that energy is an output of Existence?
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
What are the ways by which we can reorient architecture to consider materials not as consumables, but as outputs of valuable and increasingly scarce ecological niches.
”
”
Neri Oxman (Neri Oxman: Material Ecology)
“
With everything we do in business, it's important that we always consider the ecological implications. And if we're really doing things the Permaculture way, then it's not just about factoring in ecological cost, but better yet ensuring that business processes and outputs actually add value to ecological and natural systems.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
I’m a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There’s no middle ground, only madness and sadness.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Fine Things: Fennel's Journal No. 8)
“
To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)
“
My goal is to do the most with the least—get the maximum output with the minimum input.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book Has No Title)
“
In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Every output is upcycled into new inputs of equal or greater value. This creates a cycle of productive utility, continuous growth and continuous expansion.
I like to invest in companies that follow nature’s example.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies, all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself didn't know when the economy crashed
”
”
Barbara Demick (Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)
“
But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
Introverts are dependent on their own inside noise, extroverts are dependent of outside noise. The outputs are dependent on quality of those noise.
”
”
Amit K Ghosh
“
The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.
”
”
Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
In terms of business resilience, it's important to have the ability to repurpose inputs and redirect outputs. It's important to have a good amount of flexibility designed into the businesses operating systems. When a business can answer the if this then that question over and over again with different fill in the blanks, it's got resilience.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
It's not happening to you, it's happening through you. Check your thoughts and your energetic output for the answers.
”
”
Sanjo Jendayi
“
With teamwork, any little contribution you make yields greater output when it meets the contribution of others, and guess who gets the plus? Everyone in the team!
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor (The Great Hand Book of Quotes)
“
Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they?
Nope.
That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.
If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy.
Nope again.
High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries)
“
Your life is in your hands. Only YOU have the capacity to turn it into a rosy path or a thorn filled one. Increase your vibrational output with Cosmic Ordering and your future will be rosy.
”
”
Stephen Richards
“
Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations.
[...] This makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.
”
”
David Graeber (Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination)
“
For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.
”
”
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis)
“
Remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
”
”
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
“
From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain’s sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. “Banish fear” was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom—fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning.
”
”
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
“
[..] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
...many women have almost always done it differently,
power without control,
leading without terrorizing,
nurturing community and communal input and output
like nurturing a family.
Maybe that's one of the main reasons powerful men resist women in power;
it's not just control they don't want to give up,
not just privilege,
but exploitation.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
You must prune to bloom. If the dead weight is not pruned and removed, it compromises the quality, performance, and output of the vine. When you prune what’s not working in your life, you make the space and place for renewal to happen and for new growth to spring forth.
”
”
Susan C. Young
“
I would learn the varying temperature of erratic desire, the caloric output of longing, and the previously undefined and eventually unbearable weight of first love.
”
”
Jim Provenzano (Every Time I Think of You)
“
The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism. What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.
”
”
Tricia Hersey (Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto)
“
Topical preaching, polemical preaching, historical preaching, and other forms of sermonic output have, one supposes, their rightful and opportune uses. But expository preaching—the prayerful expounding of the Word of God is preaching that is preaching—pulpit effort par excellence.
”
”
E.M. Bounds (The Complete Works of E. M. Bounds on Prayer: Experience the Wonders of God through Prayer)
“
Your job in a world of intelligent machines is to keep making sure they do what you want, both at the input (setting the goals) and at the output (checking that you got what you asked for).
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
“
Ultimately, incentive structures and systems drive ESG investing, which can be disingenuous. Structurally, public market investors continue to focus on the incentives which maximize their financial returns, even while taking certain ESG inputs into account in their portfolio allocations. Only by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes might investors alter their investment strategies towards new rewards based on ESG outputs.
”
”
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
“
The bright light of brilliance keeps the darkness away, but it can be so very exhausting.
”
”
Fennel Hudson (Fine Things: Fennel's Journal No. 8)
“
Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.
”
”
Jack Ketchum (Peaceable Kingdom)
“
Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.
”
”
David Eagleman (Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain)
“
Contrary to any claim of a systematically “neutral” effect of taxation on production, the consequence of any such shortening of roundabout methods of production is a lower output produced. The price that invariably must be paid for taxation, and for every increase in taxation, is a coercively lowered productivity that in turn reduces the standard of living in terms of valuable assets provided for future consumption. Every act of taxation necessarily exerts a push away from more highly capitalized, more productive production processes in the direction of a hand-to-mouth-existence.
”
”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
“
Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not. It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.” You are either living as a monk or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.
”
”
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
“
At Mayflower-Plymouth, our perspective is largely influenced by what we learn from nature.
A good investment is like a good fruit tree. From its conception, it grows exponentially larger - consistently and reliably. Its required input is a small percentage relative to its output. It regularly gives back to the broader ecosystem, helping multiple other lives to prosper as well. And it produces an abundance of fruit for the enjoyment of its owner.
This is how all good investments are. And this is our perspective at Mayflower-Plymouth.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
Every piece of data ingested by a model plays a role in determining its behavior. The fairness, transparency, and representativeness of the data reflect directly in the LLMs' outputs. Ignoring ethical considerations in data sourcing can inadvertently perpetuate harmful stereotypes, misinformation, or gaps in knowledge. It can also infringe on the rights of data creators.
”
”
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
“
[The USA in the '70s] The country's cinematic output was appropriately bleak, reflecting the moroseness and self-hatred that riddled the national psyche. Anti-heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde, Travis Bickle, Popeye Doyle and the Corleones dominated the box office and the public wallowed in a morass of guilty introspection. There was never a country in more desperate need of a blow job than the United States of America: enter George Lucas.
”
”
Simon Pegg (Nerd Do Well)
“
Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo. It was Mobutu who robbed the country of its wealth, plundering national reserves on a scale economists have still not been able to gauge accurately. When he came to power, the Congo had a thriving mineral industry, reliant on copper from the south-eastern province of Katanga and diamonds from the central province of Kasai. When he was driven from office in May 1997 to die in exile a few months later, the country was broke and the output of the mines a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier.
”
”
Tim Butcher (Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart)
“
Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.
There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something – feats that modern computers simply do not do.
”
”
David Eagleman (Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain)
“
The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled. Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors “curing” patients simply by declaring that they are cured.
”
”
Walter E. Williams (Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 599))
“
The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
There has not been a piece of technology designed to save labor that has not increased labor. Word processors allow you to do what your secretary used to do for you. The Internet, BlackBerries, iPhones, yes they keep you tethered, but that's not the main problem. It's that along with increasing personal productivity, they increase the expectation of productivity. It no longer becomes a bonus to do the work of one and a half men, but the norm. And then when everyone’s working at one hundred and fifty percent capacity, they can fire a third of the workforce and still maintain output.
”
”
Wayne Gladstone (Notes from the Internet Apocalypse)
“
To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while....
”
”
Lucy Sussex
“
The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do.
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Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
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He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output rose significantly higher than the input. He concluded that, if allowed politically, such discoveries could guide humankind in building a completely clean energy infrastructure -- resonant technologies that allow us to live in harmony with the universal energy field and the Earth.
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Jeane Manning (Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World)
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To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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I don’t have time for X.” In this excuse, “X” generally refers to working out, healthy eating/ shopping, or meditation. But I learned that none of these things necessarily cost you time. In fact, they often buy back time by making you more energized and productive. If you’re sharper, more on the ball, and better able to output things that matter, because you took the time to work out and eat healthier, then the workout or healthy diet wasn’t a deficit.
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Brendon Burchard (High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way)
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Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide — as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.
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Janna Levin (BLACK HOLE BLUES AND OTHER SONGS)
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An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
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When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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Similarly, the total output of human creativity, in all its kaleidoscopic breadth, pieces together the fabric forming our culture. The underlying intention of our work is the aspect allowing it to fit neatly into this fabric. Rarely if ever do we know the grand intention, yet if we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape.
Intention is all there is. The work is just a reminder.
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Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
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Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution we’ve referred to above. Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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As regards any specific book, I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output ( the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world...........I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way................. life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.
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William Faulkner
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...the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth.
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Émile Zola (Lourdes (Three Cities Trilogy, #1))
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Safety, equality, security, and freedom for me are rooted in safety, equality, security, and freedom for every human. Peaceful coexistence on this beautiful planet we share cannot be achieved by warfare. It cannot be achieved by power. And it cannot be achieved by ignoring each others' suffering. We cannot kill our way to peace, oppress others to create to peace, or close our eyes to achieve peace. Peace is the only path to peace. Our humanity is indelibly linked to our treatment of one another. Humane treatment grows humanity. Inhumane treatment destroys humanity. At its roots, humanity is an elegantly simple equation - input equals output.
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L.R. Knost
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Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 — 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia
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Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
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Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power."
"These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows.
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Jeane Manning (Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World)
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One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a “personal shopper” program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers’ desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After history’s first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten.
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John Scalzi (The Android's Dream)
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Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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You became conscious of precisely what you unconsciously intended to say only when you said it. You modify your speech depending on wether you are talking to child, a colleague, a student, or a dean. Not consiously, most probably. Paradoxically, speech is usually considered the case of conscious behavior - behavior for which we hold people responsoble. Certainly, it require consciousness: you cannot have a conversation while in deep sleep or in coma. Nevertheless, the activities that organize your speech output are not conscious activities. Speaking is a highly skilled business, relyling on uncounscious knowledge of precisely what to say and how.
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Patricia S. Churchland (Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves)
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DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Ever more complex life forms input information from sensors such as eyes and ears and process the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and then act on the world, by outputting information to muscles, for example. As some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I regard it a triumph that we, who are ourselves mere stardust, have come to such a detailed understanding of the universe in which we live.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain— indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. 12 Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. Bach, for his part, composed so prolifically that it would take decades of work merely to hand- copy his scores, yet only a small fraction of this prodigious output is commonly performed.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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I tried to hold fire once...see from a distance it mesmerized me
captivated me
for hours at a time
The more it danced with the wind,
I felt my body sway to its rhythm
I tried to hold fire once
It's glow drew me in closer
And although I know full well the damage that fire can do...
Staring directly at it,
I know it's beauty too
It's warmth was now on my face and
I couldn't imagine being in any other place
I reached out with my bare hands &
it danced even more
And suddenly I felt it's heat deep within my core
Rising like a volcano ready to erupt
But somehow balanced & purposeful
I tried to hold fire once
until I realized that fire held me Passionately and
I was it's guiding force.
If you look close enough, you'll see it dancing in my eyes,
feel it in my touch,
even hear it in my voice...but don't ever forget that fire consumes and cannot be contained so I must master my energetic output to control the flames.
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Sanjo Jendayi
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Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.
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Lewis Mumford
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An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York’s Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing—full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, “nature” was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good. But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural river black—full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts—and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult to for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.
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Makoto Fujimura (Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life)
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It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential. It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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James O. Incandenza - A Filmography
The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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Suppose you unexpectedly see a person you care about. Suddenly you feel the love you have, for that person. Let's follow the flow of information from the visual system through the brain to the point of the experience of love as best we can. First of all, the stimulus will flow from the visual system to the prefrontal cortex (putting an image of the loved one in working memory). The stimulus also reaches the explicit memory system of the temporal lobe and activates memories and integrates them with the image of the person. Simultaneously with these processes, the subcortical areas presumed to be involved in attachment will be activated (the exact paths by which the stimulus reaches these areas is not known, however). Activation of attachment circuits then impacts on working memory in several ways. One involves direct connections from the attachment areas to the prefrontal cortex (as with fear, it is the medial prefrontal region that is connected with subcortical attachment areas). Activation of attachment circuits also leads to activation of brain stem arousal networks, which then participate in the focusing of attention on the loved one by working memory. Bodily responses will also be initiated as outputs of attachment circuits, and contrast with the alarm responses initiated by fear and stress circuits. We approach rather than try to escape from or avoid the person, and these behavioral differences are accompanied by different physiological conditions within the body. This pattern of inputs to working memory from within the brain and from the body biases us more toward an open and accepting mode of processing than toward tension and vigilance. The net result in working memory is the feeling of love.
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Joseph E. LeDoux
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Consequently, in 1958 the Chinese government was informed that annual grain production was 50 per cent more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese.3 Meanwhile, enthusiastic reports of China’s farming miracle reached audiences throughout the world. Julius Nyerere, the idealistic president of Tanzania, was deeply impressed by the Chinese success. In order to modernise Tanzanian agriculture, Nyerere resolved to establish collective farms on the Chinese model. When peasants objected to the plan, Nyerere sent the army and police to destroy traditional villages and forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of peasants onto the new collective farms. Government propaganda depicted the farms as miniature paradises, but many of them existed only in government documents. The protocols and reports written in the capital Dar es Salaam said that on such-and-such a date the inhabitants of such-and-such village were relocated to such-and-such farm. In reality, when the villagers reached their destination, they found absolutely nothing there. No houses, no fields, no tools. Officials nevertheless reported great successes to themselves and to President Nyerere. In fact, within less than ten years Tanzania was transformed from Africa’s biggest food exporter into a net food importer that could not feed itself without external assistance. In 1979, 90 per cent of Tanzanian farmers lived on collective farms, but they generated only 5 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.4
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)