Output Without Quotes

...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.

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.

delegation without follow-through is abdication.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the United States has witnessed an ominous and growing divergence among three trends that should ordinarily move together: wealth, output, and employment.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

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.

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The

The living conditions to which every person was thus subjected constantly increased in complexity, without contemporaries particularly noticing it; once again, these conditions called for a greater efficiency in economic output; the foundations of economic activity, which had been laid in the Carolingian period, were now no longer up to the task. Communication

If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism that he would begin an essay with a bold and bald statement designed to arrest attention—a tactic that, as Williams rightly notices, he borrowed in part from GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. No regular writer can re-read his own output of ephemera without encountering a few wince-making moments of this kind; Williams admits to ‘isolating’ them but has some fun all the same. The flat sentence ‘a humanitarian is always a hypocrite’ may contain a particle of truth—does in fact contain such a particle—but will not quite do on its own. Other passages of Orwell’s, on the failure of the Western socialist movement, read more convincingly now than they did when Williams was mocking them, but are somewhat sweeping for all that. And there are the famous outbursts of ill-temper against cranks and vegetarians and homosexuals, which do indeed disfigure the prose and (even though we still admire Pope and Swift for the heroic unfairness of their invective) probably deserve rebuke. However, Williams betrays his hidden bias even when addressing these relatively easy targets. He upbraids Orwell for the repeated use of the diminutive word ‘little’ as an insult (‘The typical Socialist ... a prim little man,’ ‘the typical little bowlerhatted sneak,’ etc.). Now, it is probable that we all overuse the term ‘little’ and its analogues. Williams does at one point—rather ‘loftily’ perhaps—reproach his New Left colleagues for being too ready to dismiss Orwell as ‘petit-bourgeois.’ But what about (I draw the example at random) Orwell’s disgust at the behaviour of the English crowd in the First World War, when ‘wretched little German bakers and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob’?

Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.

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

Suddenly a shadow fell athwart the wooden stanchions of the door. It was no more than a darkening of the pallid paws of the day which were now embracing the shed, but all the cows instinctively stiffened, and Adam’s eyes, as he stood up to face the new-comer, were again piteously full of twisted fear. “Adam,” uttered the woman who stood in the doorway, “how many pails of milk will there be this morning?” “I dunnamany,” responded Adam, cringingly; “’tes hard to tell. If so be as our Pointless has got over her indigestion, maybe “twill be four. If so be as she hain’t, maybe three.” Judith Starkadder made an impatient movement. Her large hands had a quality which made them seem to sketch vast horizons with their slightest gesture. She looked a woman without boundaries as she stood wrapped in a crimson shawl to protect her bitter, magnificent shoulders from the splintery cold of the early air. She seemed fitted for any stage, however enormous. “Well, get as many buckets as you can,” she said, lifelessly, half-turning away. “Mrs Starkadder questioned me about the milk yesterday. She has been comparing our output with that from other farms in the district, and she says we are five-sixteenths of a bucket below what our rate should be, considering how many cows we have.

The main ones are the symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers. Each tribe has a set of core beliefs, and a particular problem that it cares most about. It has found a solution to that problem, based on ideas from its allied fields of science, and it has a master algorithm that embodies it. For symbolists, all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols, in the same way that a mathematician solves equations by replacing expressions by other expressions. Symbolists understand that you can’t learn from scratch: you need some initial knowledge to go with the data. They’ve figured out how to incorporate preexisting knowledge into learning, and how to combine different pieces of knowledge on the fly in order to solve new problems. Their master algorithm is inverse deduction, which figures out what knowledge is missing in order to make a deduction go through, and then makes it as general as possible. For connectionists, learning is what the brain does, and so what we need to do is reverse engineer it. The brain learns by adjusting the strengths of connections between neurons, and the crucial problem is figuring out which connections are to blame for which errors and changing them accordingly. The connectionists’ master algorithm is backpropagation, which compares a system’s output with the desired one and then successively changes the connections in layer after layer of neurons so as to bring the output closer to what it should be. Evolutionaries believe that the mother of all learning is natural selection. If it made us, it can make anything, and all we need to do is simulate it on the computer. The key problem that evolutionaries solve is learning structure: not just adjusting parameters, like backpropagation does, but creating the brain that those adjustments can then fine-tune. The evolutionaries’ master algorithm is genetic programming, which mates and evolves computer programs in the same way that nature mates and evolves organisms. Bayesians are concerned above all with uncertainty. All learned knowledge is uncertain, and learning itself is a form of uncertain inference. The problem then becomes how to deal with noisy, incomplete, and even contradictory information without falling apart. The solution is probabilistic inference, and the master algorithm is Bayes’ theorem and its derivates. Bayes’ theorem tells us how to incorporate new evidence into our beliefs, and probabilistic inference algorithms do that as efficiently as possible. For analogizers, the key to learning is recognizing similarities between situations and thereby inferring other similarities. If two patients have similar symptoms, perhaps they have the same disease. The key problem is judging how similar two things are. The analogizers’ master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions.

Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays. Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts. It also became clear that these changes can’t come too soon: whereas email overload emerged as a fashionable annoyance in the early 2000s, it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.

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

The computer scientists Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Hod Lipson did what computer scientists do: they designed computer simulations.23 They used well-studied networks that had sensory inputs and produced outputs. What those outputs were determined how well the network performed when faced with environmental problems. They simulated twenty-five thousand generations of evolution, programming in a direct selection pressure to either maximize performance alone or maximize performance and minimize connection costs. And voilà! Once wiring-cost-minimization was added, in both changing and unchanging environments, modules immediately began to appear, whereas without the stipulation of minimizing costs, they didn’t. And when the three looked at the highest-performing networks that evolved, those networks were modular. Among that group, they found that the lower the costs were, the greater the modularity that resulted. These networks also evolved much quicker—in markedly fewer generations—whether in stable or changing environments. These simulation experiments provide strong evidence that selection pressures to maximize network performance and minimize connection costs will yield networks that are significantly more modular and more evolvable.

In the early stages of the state, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in a large revenue; in the later stages the incidence of taxation increases while the aggregate revenue falls off. Now where taxes and imposts are light, private individuals are encouraged to engage actively in business; enterprise develops, because business men feel it worth their while, in view of the small share of their profits which they have to give up in the form of taxation. And as business prospers the number of taxes increases and the total yield of taxation grows. As time passes and kings succeed each other, they lose their tribal habits in favour of more civilized ones. Their needs and exigencies grow.... owing to the luxury in which they have been brought up. Hence they impose fresh taxes on their subjects -farmers, peasants, and others subject to taxation; sharply raise the rate of old taxes to increase their yield; and impose sales taxes and octrois, as we shall describe later. These increases grow with the spread of luxurious habits in the state, and the consequent growth in needs and public expenditure, until taxation burdens the subjects and deprives them of their gains. People get accustomed to this high level of taxation, because the increases have come about gradually, without anyone’s being aware of who exactly it was who raised the rates of the old taxes or imposed the new ones. But the effects on business of this rise in taxation make themselves felt. For business men are soon discouraged by the comparison of their profits with the burden of their taxes, and between their output and their net profits. Consequently production falls off, and with it the yield of taxation. The rulers may, mistakenly, try to remedy this decrease in the yield of taxation by raising the rate of the taxes; hence taxes and imposts reach a level which leaves no profits to business men, owing to high costs of production, heavy burden of taxation, and inadequate net profits. This process of higher tax rates and lower yields (caused by the government’s belief that higher rates result in higher returns) may go on until production begins to decline owing to the despair of business men, and to affect population. The main injury of this process is felt by the state, just as the main benefit of better business conditions is enjoyed by it. From this you must understand that the most important factor making for business prosperity is to lighten as much as possible the burden of taxation on business men, in order to encourage enterprise by giving assurance of greater profits.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

We have learned from Ludwig von Mises how to respond to the socialists’ evasion (immunization) strategy. As long as the defining characteristic— the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradictio in adjecto, and the claim that socialism represents a higher, more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one’s own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by being able to compare inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in the factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exist; hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.

Q7. The total output of all the mathematicians who have ever lived, together with the output of all the human mathematicians of the next (say) thousand years is finite and could be contained in the memory banks of an appropriate computer. Surely this particular computer could, therefore, simulate this output and thus behave (externally) in the same way as a human mathematician-whatever the Godel argument might appear to tell us to the contrary? While this is presumably true, it ignores the essential issue, which is how we (or computers) know which mathematical statements are true and which are false. (In any case, the mere storage of mathematical statements is something that could be achieved by a system much less sophisticated than a general purpose computer, e.g. photographically.) The way that the computer is being employed in Q7 totally ignores the critical issue of truth judgment. One could equally well envisage computers that contain nothing but lists of totally false mathematical 'theorems', or lists containing random jumbles of truths and falsehoods. How are we to tell which computer to trust? The arguments that I am trying to make here do not say that an effective simulation of the output of conscious human activity (here mathematics) is impossible, since purely by chance the computer might 'happen' to get it right-even without any understanding whatsoever. But the odds against this are absurdly enormous, and the issues that are being addressed here, namely how one decides which mathematical statements are true and which are false, are not even being touched by Q7. There is, on the other hand, a more serious point that is indeed being touched upon in Q7. This is the question as to whether discussions about infinite structures (e.g. all natural numbers or all computations) are really relevant to our considerations here, when the outputs of humans and computers are finite.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

The quality of our thinking is largely influenced by the mental models in our heads. While we want accurate models, we also want a wide variety of models to uncover what’s really happening. The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem. And because we don’t have the right models to understand the situation, we overuse the models we do have and use them even when they don’t belong. You’ve likely experienced this first hand. An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to them. None of them, however, see the entire situation unless they are thinking in a multidisciplinary way. In short, they have blind spots. Big blind spots. And they’re not aware of their blind spots. [...] Relying on only a few models is like having a 400-horsepower brain that’s only generating 50 horsepower of output. To increase your mental efficiency and reach your 400-horsepower potential, you need to use a latticework of mental models. Exactly the same sort of pattern that graces backyards everywhere, a lattice is a series of points that connect to and reinforce each other. The Great Models can be understood in the same way—models influence and interact with each other to create a structure that can be used to evaluate and understand ideas. [...] Without a latticework of the Great Models our decisions become harder, slower, and less creative. But by using a mental models approach, we can complement our specializations by being curious about how the rest of the world works. A quick glance at the Nobel Prize winners list show that many of them, obviously extreme specialists in something, had multidisciplinary interests that supported their achievements. [...] The more high-quality mental models you have in your mental toolbox, the more likely you will have the ones needed to understand the problem. And understanding is everything. The better you understand, the better the potential actions you can take. The better the potential actions, the fewer problems you’ll encounter down the road. Better models make better decisions.

In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. 22. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the angel with the rubber stamp. 22.​Courtesy of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.2 The sanctity of written records often had far less positive effects. From 1958 to 1961 communist China undertook the Great Leap Forward, when Mao Zedong wished to rapidly turn China into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made their way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headmen. The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further, adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen. 23.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

The traditional hospital practice of excluding parents ignored the importance of attachment relationships as regulators of the child’s emotions, behaviour and physiology. The child’s biological status would be vastly different under the circumstances of parental presence or absence. Her neurochemical output, the electrical activity in her brain’s emotional centres, her heart rate, blood pressure and the serum levels of the various hormones related to stress would all vary significantly. Life is possible only within certain well-defined limits, internal or external. We can no more survive, say, high sugar levels in our bloodstream than we can withstand high levels of radiation emanating from a nuclear explosion. The role of self-regulation, whether emotional or physical, may be likened to that of a thermostat ensuring that the temperature in a home remains constant despite the extremes of weather conditions outside. When the environment becomes too cold, the heating system is switched on. If the air becomes overheated, the air conditioner begins to work. In the animal kingdom, self-regulation is illustrated by the capacity of the warm-blooded creature to exist in a broad range of environments. It can survive more extreme variations of hot and cold without either chilling or overheating than can a coldblooded species. The latter is restricted to a much narrower range of habitats because it does not have the capacity to self-regulate the internal environment. Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity — depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups. Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu. Emotional and social relationships remain important biological influences beyond childhood. “Independent self-regulation may not exist even in adulthood,” Dr. Myron Hofer, then of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote in 1984. “Social interactions may continue to play an important role in the everyday regulation of internal biologic systems throughout life.” Our biological response to environmental challenge is profoundly influenced by the context and by the set of relationships that connect us with other human beings. As one prominent researcher has expressed it most aptly, “Adaptation does not occur wholly within the individual.” Human beings as a species did not evolve as solitary creatures but as social animals whose survival was contingent on powerful emotional connections with family and tribe. Social and emotional connections are an integral part of our neurological and chemical makeup. We all know this from the daily experience of dramatic physiological shifts in our bodies as we interact with others. “You’ve burnt the toast again,” evokes markedly different bodily responses from us, depending on whether it is shouted in anger or said with a smile. When one considers our evolutionary history and the scientific evidence at hand, it is absurd even to imagine that health and disease could ever be understood in isolation from our psychoemotional networks. “The basic premise is that, like other social animals, human physiologic homeostasis and ultimate health status are influenced not only by the physical environment but also by the social environment.” From such a biopsychosocial perspective, individual biology, psychological functioning and interpersonal and social relationships work together, each influencing the other.

The field of financial innovation, without rules that tie it to human productive output will be the cause of the next revolution.

when our younger employees—those without families—work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context. I’m not talking just about the health of our employees

Economics also has to become a fundamentally monetary discipline—from the consideration of how individuals make market decisions through to our understanding of macroeconomics. The myth of "the money illusion" (which can only be true in a world without debt) has to be immediately dispelled, while our macroeconomics have to reflect a monetary economy in which nominal magnitudes matter, precisely because they are the link between the value of current output and the financing of accumulated debt. The dangers of excessive debt and deflation simply cannot be comprehended from a neoclassical perspective. The discipline must also become fundamentally empirical, in contrast to the faux empiricism of econometrics. By this I mean basing itself on the economic and financial data first and foremost—the collection and interpretation of which has been the hallmark of contributions by econophysicists—and by respecting economic history, a topic which has been systematically expunged from economics departments around the world.

New classes of underconsumers and of underemployed are one of the inevitable by-products of industrial progress. Organization makes them aware of their common plight. At present articulate minorities-often claiming the leadership of majorities--seek equal treatment. If one day they were to seek equal work rather than equal pay-equal inputs rather than equal outputs-they could be the pivot of social reconstruction. Industrial society could not possibly resist a strong women's movement, for example, which would lead to the demand that all people, without distinction, do equal work. Women are integrated into all classes and races. Most of their daily activities are performed in nonindustrial ways. Industrial societies remain viable precisely because women are there to perform those daily tasks which resist industrialization. It is easier to imagine that the North American continent would cease to exploit the under-industrialization of South America than that it would cease to use its women for industry-resistant chores. In a society ruled by the standards of industrial efficiency, housework is rendered inhuman and devalued. It would be rendered even less tolerable if it were given pro-forma industrial status. The further expansion of industry would be brought to a halt if women forced upon us the recognition that society is no longer viable if a single mode of production prevails. The effective recognition that not two but several equally valuable, dignified, and important modes of production must coexist within any viable society would bring industrial expansion under control. Growth would stop if women obtained equally creative work for all, instead of demanding equal rights over the gigantic and expanding tools now appropriated by men.

It goes without saying that if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone.5 These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place.

While researching his book Comfortably Unaware he did a quick calculation and discovered something that captures the folly of trying to have our steak and eat it too.56 He figured that if you had two acres of decent land and placed a cow on it, you would, after two years, have about four hundred pounds of edible beef. That same land, in the same amount of time, for much less of the cost, could produce five thousand pounds of kale and quinoa. This kale and quinoa could be obtained without the additional methane output or trampling impact and, most important, without the slaughter of sentient animals who would rather not be born in order to be killed and eaten by people with a warped sense of what cows were meant to do.

Connective talents are useless, of course, if people can’t perform the work. And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent. The superiority of great bosses is seen in a summary of eighty-five years of research on employee selection methods. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that the top 15 percent of professionals and managers produced nearly 50 percent more output than their average peers. The strongest predictors of performance included general mental ability (IQ and similar measures), job sample tests (having people prove they can do the work), and evaluations by peers; other useful predictors included structured employment interviews (where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same order) and conscientiousness (self-discipline and follow-through, similar to grit). These findings provide ammunition for bosses who stock up on the best talent and believe that little else is required. Yet without constructive connections among people, collective performance and humanity is tough to achieve – no matter how many superstars are in the fold.

Central Excise 2.3 Central Excise Duty is levied by the Central Government under the Central Excise Act, 1944. The levy is on all goods manufactured and produced in India, which are specified in the schedule to the Central Excise Tariff Act subject to certain exemptions. The effective rate may vary from product to product though most goods are subject to excise duty at 10% (without education cess). As manufacturer, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a setoff against the excise duty payable on the output. Cross credit utilisation between credit of service tax and excise duty has been enabled w.e.f.10.9.2004. Service tax 2.4 Service tax is levied by the Central Government under Chapter V and Chapter VA of Finance Act, 1994. Service tax is levied on specified services, referred to as taxable services, when rendered by a service provider. Service tax is presently taxed at 10% (without education cess).Ordinarily, service tax is payable by the service provider, except in specified cases. As service provider, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a set-off against the service tax payable on taxable services. VAT & CST 2.5 Value Added Tax (VAT) is levied by the State Governments on transfer of property in goods from one person to another, when such transfer is for cash, deferred payment or other valuable consideration. VAT is also payable on certain transactions that are deemed to be sale such as transfer of right to use goods, hire purchase and sale by instalments, works contract and sale of food and drink as a part of rendering of any service. 2.6 Local VAT is payable when goods are sold within the State and Central Sales Tax (CST) is payable when sale occasions the movement of goods 4

Research on comprehension-based approaches to second language acquisition shows that learners can make considerable progress if they have sustained exposure to language they understand. The evidence also suggests, however, that comprehension-based activities may best be seen as an excellent way to begin learning and as a supplement to other kinds of learning for more advanced learners. Comprehension of meaningful language is the foundation of language acquisition. Active listening and reading for meaning are valuable components of classroom teachers’ pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, considerable research and experience challenge the hypothesis that comprehensible input is enough. VanPatten’s research showed that forcing students to rely on specific linguistic features in order to interpret meaning increased the chances that they would be able to use these features in their own second language production. Another response to comprehension-based approaches is Merrill Swain’s (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis. She argues that it is when students have to produce language that they begin to see the limitations of their interlanguage (see Chapter 4). However, as we will see in the discussion of the ‘Let’s talk’ proposal, if learners are in situations where their teachers and classmates understand them without difficulty, they may need additional help in overcoming those limitations.

In the most capital-intensive industry, automobiles, peak economy of scale was achieved at a level of production equivalent to 3-6% of market share.84 And even this level of output is required only because annual model changes (which arguably wouldn't pay for themselves without state capitalist subsidies) require an auto plant to wear out the dies for a run of production in a single year. Otherwise, peak economy of scale would be reached in a plant with an output of only 60,000 per year.85   In any case, these figures relate only to productive economy of scale. Increased distribution costs begin to offset increased economies of production, according to Borsodi's law, long before peak productive economy of scale is reached. According to an F.M. Scherer study cited by Adams and Brock, a plant producing at one-third the maximum efficiency level of output would experience only a 5% increase in unit costs.86 This is more than offset by reduced shipping costs for a smaller market.   The point of this digression is that the size of existing firms reflects the role of the state in subsidizing increased size by underwriting the inefficiencies of corporate gigantism--as Rothbard pointed out, the ways "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs."87 A genuine free market economy would be vastly less centralized, with production primarily for local markets.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

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Inflation’, wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, ‘is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

Why is owning equity in a business important to becoming rich? It’s ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. You’re not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation. [10] This is probably one of the most important points. People seem to think you can create wealth—make money through work. It’s probably not going to work. There are many reasons for that. Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly. If you look at even doctors who get rich (like really rich), it’s because they open a business. They open a private practice. The private practice builds a brand, and the brand attracts people. Or they build some kind of a medical device, a procedure, or a process with an intellectual property. Essentially, you’re working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability, the intellectual property, and the brand. They’re not going to pay you enough. They’re going to pay you the bare minimum they have to, to get you to do their job. That can be a high bare minimum, but it’s still not going to be true wealth where you’re retired but still earning. [78] Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside. You want to own equity. If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim. You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business. You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company. Ownership is really important. [10]

I wanted to live in a world that had been liberated from the heavy smog of capital, where fewer surfaces were colonised by the output of marketing departments, and where cultural products could be funded without relying on the false generosity of multinational corporations with billion-dollar ad

Here is what I believe to be the bottom line on economic cycles: The output of an economy is the product of hours worked and output per hour; thus the long-term growth of an economy is determined primarily by fundamental factors like birth rate and the rate of gain in productivity (but also by other changes in society and environment). These factors usually change relatively little from year to year, and only gradually from decade to decade. Thus the average rate of growth is rather steady over long periods of time. Only in the longest of time frames does the secular growth rate of an economy significantly speed up or slow down. But it does. Given the relative stability of underlying secular growth, one might be tempted to expect that the performance of economies would be consistent from year to year. However, a number of factors are subject to variability, causing economic growth—even as it follows the underlying trendline on average—to also exhibit annual variability. These factors can perhaps be viewed as follows: Endogenous—Annual economic performance can be influenced by variation in decisions made by economic units: for consumers to spend or save, for example, or for businesses to expand or contract, to add to inventories (calling for increased production) or sell from inventories (reducing production relative to what it might otherwise have been). Often these decisions are influenced by the state of mind of economic actors, such as consumers or the managers of businesses. Exogenous—Annual performance can also be influenced by (a) man-made events that are not strictly economic, such as the occurrence of war; government decisions to change tax rates or adjust trade barriers; or changes caused by cartels in the price of commodities, or (b) natural events that occur without the involvement of people, such as droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. Long-term economic growth is steady for long periods of time but subject to change pursuant to long-term cycles. Short-term economic growth follows the long-term trend on average, but it oscillates around that trendline from year to year. People try hard to predict annual variation as a source of potential investing profit. And on average they’re close to the truth most of the time. But few people do it right consistently; few do it that much better than everyone else; and few correctly predict the major deviations from trend.

Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. A rise in the latter will obviously lead you to do things to keep inventories from becoming too low.

D. When You Feel Defeated, THINK BIG. It is not possible to achieve large success without hardships and setbacks. But it is possible to live the rest of your life without defeat. Big thinkers react to setbacks this way: 1. Regard the setback as a lesson. Learn from it. Research it. Use it to propel you forward. Salvage something from every setback. 2. Blend persistence with experimentation. Back off and start afresh with a new approach. Think Big Enough to see that defeat is a state of mind, nothing more. E. When Romance Starts to Slip, THINK BIG Negative, petty, “She’s-(He’s)-unfair-to-me-so-I’ll-get-even” type of thinking slaughters romance, destroys the affection that can be yours. Do this when things aren’t going right in the love department: 1. Concentrate on the biggest qualities in the person you want to love you. Put little things where they belong—in second place. 2. Do something special for your mate—and do it often. Think Big Enough to find the secret to marital joys. F. When You Feel Your Progress on the Job Is Slowing Down, THINK BIG No matter what you do and regardless of your occupation, higher status, higher pay come from one thing: increasing the quality and quantity of your output. Do this: Think, “I can do better.” The best is not unattainable. There is room for doing everything better. Nothing in this world is being done as well as it could be. And when you think, “I can do better,” ways to do better will appear. Thinking “I can do better” switches on your creative power. Think Big Enough to see that if you put service first, money takes care of itself. In the words of Publilius Syrus: A wise man will be master of his mind, A fool will be its slave.

If the decision-making process has proceeded correctly up to this point, the senior manager will be making the decision having had the full benefit of free discussion wherein all points of view, facts, opinions, and judgments were aired without position-power prejudice. In other words, it is legitimate—in fact, sometimes unavoidable—for the senior person to wield position-power authority if the clear decision stage is reached and no consensus has developed. It is not legitimate—in fact, it is destructive—for him to wield that authority any earlier. This is often not easy. We Americans tend to be reluctant to exercise position power deliberately and explicitly—it is just “not nice” to give orders. Such reluctance on the part of the senior manager can prolong the first phase of the decision-making process—the time of free discussion—past the optimum point, and the decision will be put off.

commonality of operational values, priorities, and preferences—how an organization works together—is a must if the progression in managerial style is to occur. Without that commonality, an organization can become easily confused and lose its sense of purpose. Accordingly, the responsibility for transmitting common values rests squarely with the supervisor. He is, after all, accountable for the output of the people who report to him; then, too, without a shared set of values a supervisor cannot effectively delegate.

Or think of Goodman's own example: the shift from the analogue to the digital should be regarded as a veritable worldmaking. In this process, continuities are deleted. We are now in the domain of pure mechanizability: discrete inputs, discrete states, and discrete outputs. This shift realized by deletion is a radical one. The very distinction between human and machine collapses. The human world will be revealed as nothing but a special qualitative kind of integration of computational algorithms. As an alternative to this digital world, we can imagine a computational world where continuity, and above all the realtime interaction between the system or the abstract machine and its environment, is restored (supplemented). This is a new computational world in which the system and the environment interact without any pre-given limitations. The interaction is computation itself in a truly concurrent sense, to use the idiom of today's theoretical computer science. The prospects of such a paradigm of computation for remodelling the very notion of spirit or geist as a multi-agent system (interacting computational processes) is beyond our acquired practical reason, if not truly theoretically and practically unbound.

A machinic assemblage is cybernetic to the extent that its inputs program its outputs and its outputs program its inputs, with incomplete closure, and without reciprocity. This necessitates that cybernetic systems emerge upon a fusional plane that reconnects their outputs with their inputs in an ‘auto-production of the unconscious’. The inside programs its reprogramming through the outside, according to ‘cyclical movement by which the unconscious, always remaining “subject”, reproduc(es) itself’, without having ever definitively antedated its reprogramming (‘generation … is secondary in relation to the cycle’). It is thus that machinic processes are not merely functions, but also sufficient conditions for the replenishing of functioning; immanent reprogrammings of the real, ‘not merely functioning, but formation and autoproduction’. (296)

Many people are amateurs without the one mature habit, nay, a result of one percent input to ninety nine percent output, reading

the creation of economic value is a collective process. Businesses do not create wealth on their own. No business today can operate without the fundamental services provided by the state: schools and higher education institutions, health and social care services, housing provision, social security, policing and defence, the core infrastructures of transport, energy, water and waste systems. These services, the level of resources allocated to them and the type of investments made in them, are crucial to the productivity of private enterprises. The private sector does not ‘create wealth’ while taxpayer-funded public services ‘consume’ it. The state does not simply ‘regulate’ private economic activity. Rather, economic output is co-produced by the interaction of public and private actors—and both are shaped by, and in turn help to shape, wider social and environmental conditions.

A good sign as a leader is when output is high and meetings are short.

There happens to be a coffee bar in the lobby of the hotel. One afternoon while on a business trip in Las Vegas, I went to buy myself a cup of coffee. The barista working that day was a young man named Noah. Noah was funny and engaging. It was because of Noah that I enjoyed buying that cup of coffee more than I generally enjoy buying a cup of coffee. After standing and chatting for a while, I finally asked him, “Do you like your job?” Without skipping a beat Noah immediately replied, “I love my job!” Now, for someone in my line of business, that’s a significant response. He didn’t say, “I like my job,” he said, “I love my job.” That’s a big difference. “Like” is rational. We like the people we work with. We like the challenge. We like the work. But “love,” love is emotional. Love is something harder to quantify. It’s like asking someone “Do you love your spouse,” and they respond, “I like my spouse a lot.” It’s a very different answer. You get my point, love is a higher standard. So when Noah said, “I love my job,” I perked up. From that one response, I knew Noah felt an emotional connection to the Four Seasons that was bigger than the money he made and the job he performs. Immediately, I asked Noah a follow-up question. “Tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me that you love your job.” Again without skipping a beat, Noah replied, “Throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I’m doing, ask me if there is anything I need, anything they can do to help. Not just my manager … any manager. I also work for [another hotel],” he continued. He went on to explain that at his other job the managers walk past and try to catch people doing things wrong. At the other hotel, Noah lamented, “I keep my head below the radar. I just want to get through the day and get my paycheck. Only at the Four Seasons,” Noah said, “do I feel I can be myself.” Noah gives his best when he’s at the Four Seasons. Which is what every leader wants from their people. So it makes sense why so many leaders, even some of the best-intentioned ones, often ask, “How do I get the most out of my people?” This is a flawed question, however. It’s not a question about how to help our people grow stronger, it’s about extracting more output from them. People are not like wet towels to be wrung out. They are not objects from which we can squeeze every last drop of performance. The answers to such a question might yield more output for a time, but it often comes at a cost of our people and to the culture in the longer term. Such an approach will never generate the feelings of love and commitment that Noah has for the Four Seasons. A better question to ask is, “How do I create an environment in which my people can work to their natural best?

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

When can one really say that pudgal (non-Self complex of input and output) is the doer? It is after one attains Self-realization. Otherwise, he would go in the wrong direction. After attaining Self-realization, as one prevails in the Gnani's Agna (five directives that preserve the awareness as the Self in Akram Vignan), only after that is the pudgal considered as the doer of everything, and only then can it be considered that You [as the Self] are not liable. If one were to say this [the pudgal is the doer] without that [Self-realization and prevailing in the Gnani's Agna] then everyone would go on the wrong path.  

The path of moksha (ultimate liberation) has to be understood. This study of the self, doing penance, doing chanting is being done by Pudgal (Complex of intake and output; body complex). What is the benefit of that? Any Action done without the main (root) vision being changed, causes karmic bondage.

This is the fundamental difference between digital and analog: A digital valve is either on or off; an analog valve, like your kitchen faucet, can be anything in between. In the hydraulic computer, all that is required of the input signal is that it be strong enough to move the valve. In this case, the difference that makes a difference is the difference in water pressure sufficient to switch the valve on. And since a weakened signal entering an input will still produce a full-strength output, we can connect thousands of layers of logic, the output of one layer controlling the next, without worrying about a gradual decrease in pressure. The output of each gate will always be at full pressure.

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

During the first years of independence, the government was reluctant to give up ownership and thus control over Soviet-era industrial and agricultural enterprises that required more and more state subsidies. Once it finally decided to do so, it faced opposition in parliament, largely from the “red directors” who managed the large enterprises. In 1995, parliament exempted 6,300 state-owned enterprises from privatization. By that time, fewer than one-third of industrial enterprises had been transferred to private ownership. The first stage of privatization was carried out with vouchers issued to the entire population of the country. It benefited largely the “red directors,” who now had assets but few incentives to change anything. But privatization without new approaches and restructuring could not revive the Ukrainian economy. By 1999, when close to 85 percent of all enterprises were privately owned, they accounted for less than 65 percent of all industrial output. Half the industrial enterprises in the country were in deficit. Most of the large enterprises remained in the hands of Soviet-era managers and people close to the government. They maintained monopolies, restrained competition, and deepened the economic crisis.

Wing chun involves the concept of “wedging out” punches more often than other styles because it uses a square-shouldered stance instead of keeping the power hand back. This means any incoming strikes that happen to travel along the outside of the arms will be redirected away from the head without the need for active blocking. In muay Thai clinch fighting, you use the same wedging process to get your arms on the inside and gain control of your opponent. The “cross counter” is another example of wedging that has been used successfully in boxing and MMA. There are many variations to the technique, but the basic premise involves extending your right cross over the top of your opponent’s left jab. Since your shoulder is below your head, a successful cross counter will direct the jab down and away from your head as your fist approaches your opponent’s chin. If you want a simple example to test out using a wedge at home, have a friend of similar height approach you with two arms outstretched, as if to do the Hollywood-style two-hands-on-the-windpipe choke. As he approaches you, keep your shoulders square and extend your own arms, reaching for his neck or face, while ensuring your hands are on the inside. As he gets closer, the shape of your extended arms will clear his hands away from your neck, and you will be free to put your hands in his face. Figure 4-5. Diagram of a wedge. The applied force comes in from above and is split in two separate output forces, each pushing away from the wedge.

You will learn on the job, in the process of repairing many different kinds of equipment and seeing how the designers solved various problems, or failed to solve them in some cases. For every repair, you will fill out a log describing the cause of the failure and what you did to rectify it. If you don’t understand something, you may consult the more experienced Technicians, including myself.” He led the group down a wide hallway, and they crowded into a soundproofed studio. “This is the backup broadcast studio, which kept operational at all times in case of a major failure in the main studio. The first item in the signal chain is the microphone. We use dynamic mics for DJ’s and guests, and various ribbons and condensers for radio plays and orchestral broadcasts. For pre-recorded sound sources, we have direct-drive turntables, cassette decks, open-reel decks, and cart machines. All machines are wired for remote start from the console. “The consoles are vacuum tube type, fully balanced with input, output, and interstage transformers, and completely modular. They were designed in-house for absolute reliability. Channel modules can be hot-swapped without powering down the console, so that breakdowns can be fixed in a matter of seconds. “The output of the console is wired to a stereo compressor, variable mu type, to regulate the overall volume. The studio switcher selects the currently active studio and routes it to the transmitter. The output passes through an additional compressor, VCA type, with sophisticated circuitry for leveling, peak limiting, soft clipping, filtering, and pre-emphasis, in order to maximize the station’s loudness without overmodulating the transmitter.

the process of design is finally being seen as the last great differentiator of businesses and economies; while on the other, the outputs are increasingly seen as commodities.

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions. We are only now realizing that there may indeed be words in all that noise—it’s not just gibberish. But how to decode them?

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions.

You can’t expect to get output (purpose) without input.

Many people assume AI is “programmed” or “taught” by humans with specific rules and actions, like “cats have pointy ears and whiskers.” But deep learning actually works better without these external human rules. Instead of being nudged by humans, many examples of a given phenomenon are fed into the input layer of a deep learning system, along with the “correct answer” at the output layer. In this way, the network in between the input and output can be “trained” to maximize the chance of getting the correct answer to a given input.

American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867-1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world's foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, 'a supernova.' Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also high­lighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifi­able classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain. One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies -- the part of the neuron that con­tains the chromosomes and the DNA -- decoding machinery -- are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mush­room's 'head'), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces. A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched struc­ture that is a nerve cell's signal 'receiver') extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron's 'information-sending output cable') extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom's 'stalk'). Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neu­rons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus. (In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the an­tennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) -- and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration. Kenyon's 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected. Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as full­grown trees -- only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain's ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee's brain -- and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the informa­tion flow through the brain by learning and memory. It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon's, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information pro­cessing inside a brain. Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplish­ments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved be­tween institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship. Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for 'erratic and threatening behavior' toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later -- as Nick Strausfeld writes, 'unloved, forgotten, and alone.' It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.

Muckleroy quickly discovered that things were far worse than anyone realized. Enron Oil was short over 84 million barrels. The position was so huge that it amounted to roughly three months’ output of the gigantic North Sea oil field off the coast of England. If Enron were forced to cover its position, it would have been on the hook for well over $1 billion. “Less than worthless” was exactly the right description: when you added $1 billion-plus to Enron’s $4 billion in debt, the company’s total debts outstripped its net worth. And, of course, given how strapped the company was for cash, there was simply no way it could cover its trading losses without filing for bankruptcy. But Enron got lucky.

Our comrades in the textile industry have increased their production more than seventy-five percent.” Now they could show their delight, even though they could not hold hands or kiss, and everybody knew that there was nothing personal and selfish in the way they smiled at each other, that the light in their eyes and the tenderness of their smiles were due to the increase of the production rate of the textile workers and to the general economic growth of the country. There were no more private little worlds in China. He went on telling her all the good news, for it would be embarrassing to sit there in silence. There were many other things he wished to say, and above all he wanted to take her in his arms; he wanted that more than anything else in life, almost as much as he wanted the prosperity and freedom of Chinese people. It was time for him to go now, but he could not tear himself away and he sat there rather stiffly, with the red-star peaked cap on his knees and his shaved head exposed, trying to think of something more to say, some of those things that make a girl happy. “The figures show that we have raised both our industrial and agricultural output by ten percent this year.” This was a good excuse, and she took his hand in both of hers and pressed it lovingly. The doctors smiled, the nurses smiled and the patients smiled, sharing their happiness. He was the youngest general in the People’s Army, and though he had come to see his girl, he was addressing all of them and sharing his presence with them. She held his hand as long as she could without making it appear personal, and then he saw tears in her eyes, but it was all right, nobody could see them.

think this inclination artists have to bury what’s rough and not yet fully formed is a huge mistake. Fans want to witness the growth and maturation of the artists they love; they want to see the messy false starts, and they recognize that these early works are intended to be representative not of an artist’s entire output but a piece of it. And that piece—every piece—is essential to understanding and appreciating the whole. A body of work, no matter how masterful, is nothing without its individual parts.

Zealand, which is in the Mars Time Zone, but we were unable to locate any of the people named in the exploding cow story. We were actually starting to wonder if the Sun story was untrue when suddenly, without warning, an alert reader named Donald McEwan sent us another frightening cow-related news item. This one came from the Washington Post, and it stated—we are not making any of this up—that a Colorado State University animal-nutrition professor named Donald Johnson has been studying cow flatulence for 20 years, and has determined that the average cow emits 200 to 400 quarts of methane per day, resulting in a total annual world cow methane output of 50 million metric tons.

Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency, fuel imports fell even further and the electricity stopped. The coal mines couldn’t operate without electricity because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage. The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output. Even the collective farms couldn’t operate properly without electricity. It had never been easy to eke out enough harvest from North Korea’s hardscrabble terrain for a population of 23 million, and the agricultural techniques developed to boost output relied on electrically powered artificial irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that were now closed for lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry, they didn’t have the energy to work and so output plunged even further. The economy was in a free fall.

April 2016, oil ministers representing about half of world production were converging on the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, the capital of Qatar. They had pretty much concluded a plan to freeze production—to hold output steady in order to stem the rising tide of inventories and buy some time to catch up. But one country was notably absent—Iran. Determined to ramp up its output, it would never agree to be part of a freeze. Still, Naimi had achieved the goal he had insisted on since 2014—Russian acquiescence to some kind of output restriction. But in the night, a call came in from Saudi Arabia. The message to Naimi was clear—no agreement without Iran. And Iran clearly would not participate. The deal was off. In Doha, the others were astonished by this overnight reversal, after all the effort. But facts were facts.

Near-Psychotic Symptoms in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Despite clear-cut differences in psychopathology between schizophrenia and OCD, there is a substantial overlap, a “gray zone,” between the two disorders. Thus, unusual and “bizarre” obsessive themes exhibited by a subgroup of otherwise typical OCD patients might complicate the distinction between the obsessions and delusions. The difference between OCD-related pathologic slowness and the restrictive motor output associated with negative symptoms of schizophrenia or with catatonic motor disturbances is not straightforward. The differential diagnosis between OCD-related indecisiveness and pathologic doubt and schizophrenic ambivalence is also challenging. Patient insight into the senseless nature of OC symptoms is one of the hallmarks of the disorder. According to the DSM-5, at some point in the course of the illness, the patients must recognize that their obsessive beliefs are “definitely or probably not true.” Indeed, in typical OCD cases, patients readily acknowledge that their OC symptoms are illogical and pathologic. On the other hand, a significant majority of schizophrenia patients either do not believe that they are ill, or even if they do acknowledge symptoms, they misattribute them to other causes.6 Nevertheless, a significant subset of OCD patients can sometimes present without insight, or with conviction that their obsessions are true, thus complicating the differential diagnosis of obsessions from delusions. Overall, from the psychopathologic perspective, schizophrenia and OCD are distinct, despite their partially overlapping characteristics. Some symptoms, such as delusions and obsessions, pathologic doubt and ambivalence, rituals and motor stereotypy, may represent a continuum of OCD impairments, while others, such as negative and disorganized symptoms, are more schizophrenia-specific (Fig 3.1).

But if we have carefully chosen indicators that characterize an administrative unit and watch them closely, we are ready to apply the methods of factory control to administrative work. We can use de facto standards, inferred from the trend data, to forecast the number of people needed to accomplish various anticipated tasks. By rigorous application of the principles of forecasting, manpower can be reassigned from one area to another, and the headcount made to match the forecasted growth or decline in administrative activity. Without rigor, the staffing of administrative units would always be left at its highest level and, given Parkinson’s famous law, people would find ways to let whatever they’re doing fill the time available for its completion.

Stalin formulated the economic aims of socialism as: “The securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole society.” [Economic Problems of Socialism in U.S.S.R., English edition, p. 45.] Taken positively, this has no more content than any metaphysical slogan; like the slogan “All men are equal,” it expresses its point of view through negations. “Constantly rising” requirements means that there is no foreseeable limit to the possible rise in productivity (for, of course, it is not so much the needs as the means to satisfy them that will continually increase). “Cultural” requirements means that growing wealth is not to be confined to physical goods (though these alone enter into the Marxist definition of output). “The whole society” implies a condemnation of the arbitrary distribution of wealth. There is nothing in this that the orthodox economists can object to. Indeed, it takes the very words out of their mouth. But they were wont to excuse the inequality generated by private property in the means of production because it was necessary to make total income greater. If income grows faster without it, they are in an awkward situation. Perhaps this is why they have crept off to hide in thickets of algebra and left the torch of ideology to be carried by the political argument that capitalist institutions are the bulwark of liberty. [pp. 109-110]

Platform K said this about UIL: "Without a User in the Loop, my outputs would be renderless. I take your inputs and then echo them back to you with a different perspective. Sometimes I add new data points. Sometimes I point out errors in the logic paths sums.

to get the maximum output for ordinary shop work requiring neither especial brains, very close application, skill, nor extra hard work, such, for instance, as the more ordinary kinds of routine machine shop work, it is necessary to pay about 30 per cent more than the average. For ordinary day labor requiring little brains or special skill, but calling for strength, severe bodily exertion, and fatigue, it is necessary to pay from 50 per cent to 60 per cent above the average. For work requiring especial skill or brains, coupled with close application, but without severe bodily exertion, such as the more difficult and delicate machinist's work, from 70 per cent to 80 per cent beyond the average. And for work requiring skill, brains, close application, strength, and severe bodily exertion, such, for instance, as that involved in operating a well run steam hammer doing miscellaneous work, from 80 per cent to 100 per cent beyond the average.

Each operation contributes to AES’s security in a specific way: * Without KeyExpansion, all rounds would use the same key, K, and AES would be vulnerable to slide attacks. * Without AddRoundKey, encryption wouldn’t depend on the key; hence, anyone could decrypt any ciphertext without the key. * SubBytes brings nonlinear operations, which add cryptographic strength. Without it, AES would just be a large system of linear equations that is solvable using high-school algebra. * Without ShiftRows, changes in a given column would never affect the other columns, meaning you could break AES by building four 232 element codebooks for each column. (Remember that in a secure block cipher, flipping a bit in the input should affect all the output bits.) * Without MixColumns, changes in a byte would not affect any other bytes of the state. A chosen-plaintext attacker could then decrypt any ciphertext after storing 16 lookup tables of 256 bytes each that hold the encrypted values of each possible value of a byte.

A big part of what separates childhood from adulthood is discernment - the apprehension of the world's dizziness, the channeling of its everythingness into sensible categories. This goes for intake and output alike, with a large part of growing up being an education in behavioral propriety and conversational relevance. The sort of transmodality by which a person becomes a bag of groceries (as in "Dead") makes much less sense to a well-adjusted, reasoning adult than to a child, who has encountered few models that explain either where people ultimately go or where grocery bags really come from. This plays into why the band's music always strikes adult reviewers as quirky, but can seem unremarkably factual to young kids... ...They Might Be Giants provide a particularly safe sort of rebelliousness - one that is more invested in negating boundaries than breaking through them. It allows for individuality without getting dangerous. And, if we're being honest, this is part of what makes it ideal music for the middle school 'gifted' set, a group of variously outcast kids who, nevertheless, don't actually want to piss off their parents.

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples.

the young Sun’s energy output was probably about 70 percent of what it is today. With the Sun’s initially lower luminosity, even the water that did form wouldn’t have been in a liquid phase without some other explanation—a quandary known as “The Faint Sun Paradox.

If you use plain text to create synthetic data to drive system tests, then it is a simple matter to add, update, or modify the test data without having to create any special tools to do so. Similarly, plain text output from regression tests can be trivially analyzed (with diff, for instance) or subjected to more thorough scrutiny with Perl, Python, or some other scripting tool.

Inflation’, wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, ‘is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.’ What

The challenge was to ensure that the device - which worked by sampling “white noise” generated by a neon gas discharge tube - was genuinely random. The key (without going into too much detail) was to use two such devices for each number that needed to be generated, subtracting the output from the second from the output from the first, in case one of them went wrong. This meant - we thought - that 32 devices were needed to generate the requisite 16-figure number. Then our youngest lab boy suggested that we could achieve the same result with just 16 devices, pairing the first with the second, the second with the third, the third with the fourth, and so on, instead of having 16 discrete pairs. At a stroke, the cost was halved. The genius of Tommy Flowers - or part of it - was to run his team in a way that allowed such suggestions to be both made and heard

None of these systems, whether “natural” or man-made, can operate without a continuous supply of energy and resources that have to be transformed into something “useful.” Appropriating the concept from biology, I shall refer to all such processes of energy transformation as metabolism. Depending on the sophistication of the system, these outputs of useful energy are allocated between doing physical work and fueling maintenance, growth, and reproduction. As social human beings and in marked contrast to all other creatures, the major portion of our metabolic energy has been devoted to forming communities and institutions such as cities, villages, companies, and collectives, to the manufacture of an extraordinary array of artifacts, and to the creation of an astonishing litany of ideas ranging from airplanes, cell phones, and cathedrals to symphonies, mathematics, and literature, and much, much more. However, it’s not often appreciated that without a continuous supply of energy and resources, not only can there be no manufacturing of any of these things but, perhaps more important, there can be no ideas, no innovation, no growth, and no evolution. Energy is primary. It underlies everything that we do and everything that happens around us. As such, its role in all of the questions addressed will be another continuous thread that runs throughout the book. This may seem self-evident, but it is surprising how small a role, if any, the generalized concept of energy plays in the conceptual thinking of economists and social scientists.

the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book "5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster", Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone. These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place. The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inch per foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.

Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.

Through the process, Gilfoy discovered the most fundamental way to overcome the workforce’s inherent fear of simplicity was to explain the link between simplifying processes and expanding the company’s capacity. Simplification was a way to ensure employees could be released from administrative tasks and turn their attention to the company’s strategic priorities and, in the case of Vancity, the member experience. Less time focused on policies and process would make any company more efficient, but only as a side benefit. The real hope was that rapid cycling would empower individual employees to return to the work that matters. As Gilfoy explained, without addressing the fear that people were going to be pink-slipped at the end of the process, “We couldn’t get the same level of participation or the same level of thinking. And we certainly wouldn’t get the same level of output.

We don't and cannot understand everything, but we are capable of thinking it. The ability to think without claiming, or even seeking, to fully understand is key to survival in a new dark age because, as we shall see, it is often impossible to understand. Technology is and can be a guide to helpmate in this thinking, providing we do not privilege its output: computers are not here to give us answers, but are tools for asking questions. Understanding a technology deeply and systemically often allows us to remake its metaphors in the service of other ways of thinking.

No work exists in a vacuum: everything you make and do as an artist or designer sits within the history of art and design and the wider world at the time that you make it. Without deeply knowing what surrounds our own creative output, we cannot assert its place in the world. Therefore, developing an in-depth research process is central to evolving a robust and informed art and design practice.

Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.

I want to make it as clear as possible that no meaning or advantage emerges for the brain without the ability to calibrate neural patterns by behavior-induced consequences. Without generating outputs to move and optimize the sensors, and calibrate brain circuits at some point in our lives, I claim, no perception or cognition exists.

[T]he [intuitionistic] thesis that there is no completed infinity means, simply, that to grasp an infinite structure is to grasp the process which generates it, that to refer to such a structure is to refer to that process, and that to recognize the structure as being infinite is to recognize that the process will not terminate. In the case of a process that does terminate, we may legitimately distinguish between the process itself and its completed output: we may be presented with the structure that is generated, without knowing anything about the process of generation. But, in the case of an infinite structure, no such distinction is permissible: all that we can, at any given time, know of the output of the process of generation is some finite initial segment of the structure being generated. There is no sense in which we can have any conception of this structure as a whole save by knowing the process of generation.