Overnight Futures Quotes

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

and that most international treaty problems would vanish overnight if everyone would just get over their snobbery long enough to sit down, have a cup of tea together, and recognise that they were all exactly the same person in slightly different hats.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

You want me to change overnight, Katie, and I’m telling you right now that it’s not going to happen. You're asking me to forget years of abuse in a matter of days.

And just like that, it was done. The world had changed overnight and would never be the same again.

It's that feeling you get somehow knowing that something great is about to happen... about to happen. While every passing day nothing great really does happen. You wake up, go to classes, study, sleep and wait for another monotonous day. You know the great day is not tomorrow, not even the day after, not even in a week or a month's time. But it says it will come soon, the way you live your life, one day at a time, only to realize 20 years have elapsed effortlessly. It will come soon, the way you meet someone without expecting or knowing that you are going to have so much fun together. It will come soon, the way dreams come true overnight- demanding years of perspiration, ironically. It will come soon like a gush of cold air in a hot afternoon. It will come soon like a stranger you feel you have already met. It will come like a guest who would be here to stay. It will come like an eternity, a serendipity, an irony. It will come when it is time for it to come, the way you fall asleep and dreams arrive from a distant land, surely but stealthily.

The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.

Grown-up people… How suddenly would it happen, the final plunge into their world? Did it really come about overnight, as Pappy said, between sleeping and waking? A day would come, a day like any other day, and looking over your shoulder you would see the shadow of the child that was, receding; and there would be no going back, no possibility of recapturing the shadow. You had to go on; you had to step forward into the future, however much you dreaded the thought, however much you were afraid.

Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for even more credit. It didn’t happen overnight – the economy behaved more like a roller coaster than a balloon. But over the long run, with the bumps evened out, the general direction was unmistakable.

Consider some basic economic truths. If the government mandates that workers who are earning $7.25 must, overnight, be paid $10.10 an hour (or even $15.00 per hour) those new dollars must originate from some source. For example, if a fast-food restaurant that employs twenty individuals is required to pay some or all of them close to 30 percent more per hour, it must account for those dollars somewhere. The restaurant can try to sell more food, it can increase the cost of food, it can cut the hours of its employees, it can hire fewer workers, or it can lay off those currently employed.

The Dataist revolution will probably take a few decades, if not a century or two. But then the humanist revolution too did not happen overnight. At first humans kept on believing in God, arguing that humans are sacred because they were created by God for some divine purpose. Only much later did some people dare say that humans are sacred in their own right, and that God doesn’t exist at all. Similarly, today most Dataists claim that the Internet-of-All-Things is sacred because humans are creating it to serve human needs. But eventually the Internet-of-All-Things may become sacred in its own right.

Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for even more credit. It didn’t happen overnight – the economy behaved more like a roller coaster than a balloon. But over the long run, with the bumps evened out, the general direction was unmistakable. Today, there is so much credit in the world that governments, business corporations and private individuals easily obtain large, long-term and low-interest loans that far exceed current income.

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.

Even the most recent IPCC report, dire as it is, spells out solutions of a sort. There are ways to mitigate things, there are ways to fix them. Ban fossil fuels. Stop eating meat and dairy; according to an IPCC report from 2014, animal agriculture contributes at least as much to global greenhouse gas emissions as the combined exhaust of all the world’s vehicles. What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.

People often ask me, “Do you seriously expect this idea of God to change the world? What about all the fanatics and terrorists?” All I can say is that the only thing that changes the world is an idea that lights our fire at a moment when we are surrounded by dry, dead kindling. Today is that kind of time. Spiritual transformation doesn’t require a majority vote. It doesn’t matter if most people don’t get it. All it takes is a committed minority, because the committed lead culture. The new scientific picture of the universe is a modern revelation. For many the realization that God can be real and is emerging from human aspirations will also be a revelation. That these revelations are both happening now, at so pivotal a moment for our species, is truly grace. They have helped me move into the new universe and feel blessed and awestruck every day, as though I’d moved from a dark basement apartment into a mountain aerie with a hundred-mile view in all directions. I don’t expect millions of people to change their ideas of God overnight, but to those who care about the human future and can see beyond ideology, to those who believe that truth matters, and to those who recognize the potential of humanity but don’t see how to make us rise to that potential, it could make all the difference to discover a God that is real.

All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory! — The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the Imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life .... — All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered, — only sucked dry! ... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top! — One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement:— ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something quite different. Nature neglected — perhaps forgot — to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts .... Between ourselves, they are not even men ....

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

To our surprise, they readily agreed. Suddenly, we were making two ambitious feature films at once—doubling our theatrical output overnight. This was a little scary, but it also felt like an affirmation of our core values. As we staffed up, I felt proud that we had insisted on quality. Decisions like that, I believed, would ensure future success.

If we say that the biblical command to love has only to do with the will and not the feelings, we make it a very narrow and somewhat insipid command since it has little, then, to do with the usual way of relating to other people. I think, rather, that the command to love is a call to the deepest and most thoroughgoing sanctification. The call is not merely to the will but to the stuff which fills the unconscious. It is a call for a transformation which only God himself can accomplish. And it is not accomplished overnight. We move from one degree of glory to another. But we should not try to squirm out of the totality of the call because we fail so badly. That is part of the process: our failure is to throw us back onto the only one who can accomplish our salvation now and in the future. Desiring God.org -On the Possibility of Saying “I Love You, But I Don’t Like You

Goats. This was once thought to be an antidote for North Korea’s economic ills. The terrain in the northern portion of the peninsula is mountainous and not suitable for farming. There are no green plots of grass for grazing cows, and therefore no source of dairy products or meat. So, in 1996, the North Koreans started a campaign to breed goats. These mountain animals are a good source of milk and meat; moreover, they feed on the shrubs tucked away high in the rocky terrain. The goat-breeding campaign led to a doubling of the goat population almost overnight, and tripled it within two years. This solved a short-term problem, but it had long-term consequences that were more destructive. The goats completely denuded the areas they inhabited, chewing up every single shrub in sight. This then had the effect of removing the last line of the land’s defense against the annual massive rains. The result? Annual monsoons led to deluges of biblical proportions, which wiped out the little remaining arable land and flooded the coal mines that were a source of energy. This only worsened the chronic food and energy shortages.

The Model S also offered a way to fix issues in a manner that people had never before encountered with a mass-produced car. Some of the early owners complained about glitches like the door handles not popping out quite right or their windshield wipers operating at funky speeds. These were inexcusable flaws for such a costly vehicle, but Tesla typically moved with clever efficiency to address them. While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work. Tesla soon began showing off its software skills for jobs other than making up for mistakes. It put out a smartphone app that let people turn on their air-conditioning or heating from afar and to see where the car was parked on a map. Tesla also began installing software updates that imbued the Model S with new features. Overnight, the Model S sometimes got new traction controls for hilly and highway driving or could suddenly recharge much faster than before or possess a new range of voice controls. Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it. As Craig Venter, one of the earliest Model S owners and the famed scientist who first decoded man’s DNA, put it, “It changes everything about transportation. It’s a computer on wheels.” The

Diablos: the name given to the igniting of, and ignited, farts. Trevor Hickey is the undisputed master of this arcane and perilous art. The stakes could not be higher. Get the timing even slightly wrong and there will be consequences far more serious than singed trousers; the word backdraught clamours unspoken at the back of every spectator’s mind. Total silence now as, with an almost imperceptible tremble (entirely artificial, ‘just part of the show’ as Trevor puts it) his hand brings the match between his legs and – foom! a sound like the fabric of the universe being ripped in two, counterpointed by its opposite, a collective intake of breath, as from Trevor’s bottom proceeds a magnificent plume of flame – jetting out it’s got to be nearly three feet, they tell each other afterwards, a cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light. No one knows quite what Trevor Hickey’s diet is, or his exercise regime; if you ask him about it, he will simply say that he has a gift, and having witnessed it, you would be hard-pressed to argue, although why God should have given him this gift in particular is less easy to say. But then, strange talents abound in the fourteen-year-old confraternity. As well as Trevor Hickey, ‘The Duke of Diablos’, you have people like Rory ‘Pins’ Moran, who on one occasion had fifty-eight pins piercing the epidermis of his left hand; GP O’Sullivan, able to simulate the noises of cans opening, mobile phones bleeping, pneumatic doors, etc., at least as well as the guy in Police Academy; Henry Lafayette, who is double-jointed and famously escaped from a box of jockstraps after being locked inside it by Lionel. These boys’ abilities are regarded quite as highly by their peers as the more conventional athletic and sporting kinds, as is any claim to physical freakishness, such as waggling ears (Mitchell Gogan), unusually high mucous production (Hector ‘Hectoplasm’ O’Looney), notable ugliness (Damien Lawlor) and inexplicably slimy, greenish hair (Vince Bailey). Fame in the second year is a surprisingly broad church; among the two-hundred-plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncrasy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated. As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to the shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now – overnight, almost – it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of them, consider mastery of Diablos to be a feather in your cap – even when you explain to them how dangerous it is, even when you offer to teach them how to do it themselves, an offer you have never extended to any of your classmates, who would actually pay big money for this expertise, or you could even call it lore – wait, come back!

The Wright Brothers lifted off in 1903,” he says, “but by 1908, only ten pilots had ever flown. Then they traveled to Europe to demonstrate their aircraft and inspired everyone. The aviation world changed overnight. Inventors began to realize, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ Between 1909 and 1912, thousands of pilots and hundreds of aircraft types were created in thirty-one countries. Entrepreneurs, not governments, drove this development, and a $50 million aviation industry was created.

Technology innovation is a key factor in retaining the gains produced by business model innovation. After all, if one technology innovation can create a new market, another technology innovation can render it obsolete, seemingly overnight. While Uber has achieved massive scale, the greatest threat to its future doesn’t come in the form of direct competitors like Didi Chuxing, though these are formidable threats. The greatest threat to Uber’s business is the technology innovation of autonomous vehicles, which could make obsolete one of Uber’s biggest competitive advantages—its carefully cultivated network of drivers—essentially overnight.

It’s the habit of process change—the undertaking of numerous, sustained changes over time—that counts. So often leaders try to change a business overnight by taking a single, bold action. Process improvement is less dramatic and glamorous than that. It’s a change in mind-set and operational norms that takes months or even years to establish, and that yields incremental, accumulated gains years into the future (remember that the compounding effect of 3 percent versus 1 percent annual productivity is huge over time). Process improvement is also about yielding some of your authority as a leader and empowering others closest to the action to improve the real work, incrementally, day after day. Their insights, judgments, and decisions large and small, compounded over a period of years, move the organization forward.

THE FUTURE DOESN’T simply arrive fully formed overnight, but emerges step by step. It first appears at seemingly random points around the fringe of society, never in the mainstream. Without context, those points can appear disparate, unrelated, and hard to connect meaningfully. But over time they fit into patterns and come into focus as a full-blown trend: a convergence of multiple points that reveal a direction or tendency, a force that combines some human need and new enabling technology that will shape the future.

Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday? So, what’s left is to make—to give—art. What’s left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What’s left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.

The prerequisite for motivation and success in any endeavor is a BIG vision for your future.

Watching trips driving under the influence of alcohol, details Since a randomized control the peaks. From the perspective of travel between the armed forces and the strategy for the enforcement of the initiation of a hasty road block using the techniques that are considered disturbing the police only with unauthorized functions this movement control points on the basis of many DUI action initiated. Every time the checkpoints suspicious driver drunk driving, Kits, laws applications traversing the streets to protect the driver. Then, when the driver suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol, it would be towards getting a DUI lawyer to be soon after fertilization. DUI prices could the lives of sick people are taken in the context concerned, so that the money really is removed before use. To clarify this point, it is important to achieve the experience in DUI legal knowledge based on track to use to get rid of costs. General address is to escape unnoticed a trip to the environment in which they can find through future target for it to rotate too slowly. In many situations, under the influence of alcohol, driving, fast that the driver Checkpoint see some time, immediate auto or truck and escapes through the information on the screen. Show information about the tours, the driver will have the opportunity not only to avoid the checkpoint. The decrease is the result of a DUI is a criminal offense, or the great nations. Suspension of driver's license penalty for a crime, loved. Large trigger additional sanctions crime and that if all packets death only a misdemeanor. Unlike the provisions in relation to the position of DUI in the direction of the nation. DUI attorney knows all the DUI laws, the only country. So it is very good in the sense speaks DUI lawyer immediately after his arrest, stay away from most of the impact. If the driver can be caught in DUI checkpoints on the road licenses are revoked. If the error in transit, these people are in high demand because of a drunk driver, it is more important. Asked the pilot, from the breath alcohol tests and inspections. If the driver refuses, blood test or breathing difficulties, law enforcement agencies, including the authority to proceed under the influence of alcohol to manage directly in the driver's driving. Control or DUI checkpoints to protect positions of police officers, the general requirements of each tram and to check that the driver may influence the direction of the excitation. This type of set up checkpoints to travel a few hours in the morning or at the weekend overnight when the possibility of impaired drivers generally. Experience driver search on the phone all alcoholic breath test and operation of a one-car conveyor belt. Again, a simple test is not available, the agenda requires sophisticated. The driver stopped and should work out of the car and then seriously consider. He is seriously considering an indication of the psychological stability and capacity. If the driver is not necessary to work the sober to catch your breath.

The Wright Brothers lifted off in 1903,” he says, “but by 1908, only ten pilots had ever flown. Then they traveled to Europe to demonstrate their aircraft and inspired everyone. The aviation world changed overnight. Inventors began to realize, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ Between 1909 and 1912, thousands of pilots and hundreds of aircraft types were created in thirty-one countries.

During the best of times, Silicon Valley brimmed with opportunity. It seemed that every kid with a laptop and a hoodie could slap the dotcom suffix on the end of almost anything—stamps.com, shoes.com, drugstore.com, webvan.com, eToys.com, garden.com—and become a millionaire overnight. Venture capitalists poured money into these companies, and their valuations soared. But there’s no piece of music in which the crescendo doesn’t eventually crash. Most people can’t recognize when they’re in a bubble—or they don’t want to recognize it. Markets and industries are cyclical by nature. During periods of significant innovation, bubbles form because expectations grow faster than reality, and hope gets too far out in front of a future that doesn’t currently exist. The problem was that the structures, timing, and valuations of these startups were all dependent upon assumed growth and the execution of ambitious business plans, and those assumptions and executions often weren’t reasonable or achievable.

I looked outside the window, and in my mind's eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders' retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: The Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and , better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.

Terrified by the prospect of his own imminent death, von Neumann asked to see the hospital’s Catholic priest and returned to the faith he had ignored ever since his family had converted to it decades earlier in Budapest. ‘There probably is a God,’ he had once told his mother. ‘Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.’ Nicholas could not bring himself to believe that his brother would ‘turn overnight into a devout Catholic’. The change worried von Neumann’s friends too. Ulam wrote to Strauss declaring himself ‘deeply perturbed about the religious angle as it developed’. Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end.

Be fair; No cultural/ technological transformation happens overnight, it should be accepted that a company digital future can crawl at first, then walk a little bit until it builds its marathon competence to run & with some luck disrupt!

The US was now, in Sam’s mind, the holy grail. It had an incumbent crypto exchange, Coinbase. But Coinbase’s CEO had already written insulting tweets about the SEC. And Coinbase, compared to FTX, was a boring and bloated casino. It had fifteen times the number of employees FTX did, and only about a fifth of FTX’s volume. Charging retail investors fees between five and fifty times what FTX charged, it was still running big losses. Even so, it was a public company, with a market capitalization of more than $75 billion. If FTX was granted a license to offer crypto futures in the United States and was given full access to US investors, it might steal Coinbase’s customers, along with its market cap. Or so Sam thought—which is why he also thought that the license might double or even triple FTX’s value overnight.

Today, listening to some of the populist leaders we now have, I am reminded of the 1930’s, when some democracies collapsed into dictatorships seemingly overnight. By turning the people into a category of exclusion-threatened on all sides by enemies, internal and external-the term was emptied of meaning. We see it happening again now in rallies where populist leaders excite and harangue crowds, channeling their resentments and hatreds against imagined enemies to distract from real problems. In the name of the people, populism denies the proper participation of those who belong to the people, allowing a particular group to appoint itself the true interpreter of popular feeling. A people ceases to be a people and becomes an inert mass manipulated by a party or demagogue. Dictatorships almost always begin this way: sowing fear in the hearts of the people, then offering to defend them from the object of their fear in exchange for denying them the power to determine their own future. For example, a fantasy of national-populism in countries with Christian majorities is its defense of ‘Christian civilizations’ from perceived enemies, whether Islam, Jews, the European Union, or the United Nations. The defense appeals to those who are often no longer religious but who regard their nation’s inheritance as a kind of identity. Their fears and loss of identity have increased at the same time as attendance at churches has declined. The loss of relationship with God and a loss of a sense of universal fraternity have contributed to this sense of isolation and fear of the future. Thus irreligious or superficially religious people vote for populists to protect their religious identity, unconcerned that fear and hatred of the other cannot be reconciled with the Gospel.

That Albert’s judgement failed him at this critical time is made abundantly clear in his decision concerning the future of his sons at this crisis in their young lives. A mere two weeks after the traumatic death of his mother, C. S. Lewis found himself standing on the Belfast quayside with Warnie, preparing to board the overnight steamer to the Lancashire port of Fleetwood. An emotionally unintelligent father bade his emotionally neglected sons an emotionally inadequate farewell. Everything that gave the young Lewis his security and identity seemed to be vanishing around him.

A blanket could be used to store valuable information that will keep future generations warm overnight. And just so you know, it wasn’t me that farted in the blanket. That’s a bit too much information, don’t you think?


The fact that large, solvent, heavily regulated banks would not lend to each other—or would lend to each other only at historically unprecedented interest rate premiums—and not lend to each other even overnight, was persuasive evidence, universally accepted by policymakers, that the crisis was essentially one of illiquidity.

… This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate people had tried to adjust not only to one another but to the new land which they had created and inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had gained it were: – those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misused freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffiring necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a condition under which that franchisement was anomaly and paradox, for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear, that third race even more alien to the people whom they resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood ran, than to the people whom they did not, – that race threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for a single fierce aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to have disinherited and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost country seats as barbers and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading, first in mufti then later in an actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who follow catastrophe and are their own protection as grasshoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew who came without protection too since after two thousand years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grand-children, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure even though forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it. …

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

There’s a theory that Treasury yields can be broken down into two components: the expected future path of overnight interest rates and the “term premium.” What’s that? Technically, the term premium is extra yield the investor receives for holding longer-term securities. The return is not just the average of the overnight rates, but a little extra yield just for holding the security for a longer period of time.