Passengers Inspiring Quotes

Because before you can worry about who’s in your passenger seat, you have to learn to drive yourself.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

You need to claim the driver's seat," Cash said. "Never take a backseat in your own life! You gotta take that bitch by the steering wheel with all your might - even if the road is bumpy, even if there's blood under your fingernails, even if you loose passengers along the way. Only you can steer your life in the direction that's best for you.

Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route.

I’m a first class passenger on the Spaceship Earth, and I got one ticket. And I gotta make the ride count, you know? And, as far as I figure, you can either take the service road or the scenic route. And, man, if I only have one ride, I want it to be beautiful. 84. Highway.

We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future.

I believe that women ought to be more proactive about making choices in life. I think that I am not happy about seeing women take the passenger's seat and playing the victim game all too often. If you know a guy is engaged, don't kiss him! There is another woman in the situation whom you are hurting and that other woman could have very well been you, your sister, your mother! If someone is committed, don't sleep with him! There is another woman in the picture that is going to get hurt and that other woman is your sister, just because she is a woman too! This is the kind of proactive I want to see in women, everywhere. We're not victims of the choices that we make; we made those choices! Is another woman doing good? More successful? Happier? Good for her. Because she is your sister and she could very well be you. Let's respect the relationships, the personal paths, the doors and the walkways of our fellow women and let us wish one another the utmost happiness. Because this is the only way up and out.

Never try to be the passenger of life. Be the driver and enjoy the ride.

Take control over your goal; be the driver, not the passenger. Don’t let anyone else decide your goal.

Gate C22 At gate C22 in the Portland airport a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed a woman arriving from Orange County. They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking, the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island, like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing. Neither of them was young. His beard was gray. She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning, the way it gathers and swells, sucking each rock under, swallowing it again and again. We were all watching– passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could taste the kisses crushed in our mouths. But the best part was his face. When he drew back and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost as though he were a mother still open from giving birth, as your mother must have looked at you, no matter what happened after–if she beat you or left you or you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth. The whole wing of the airport hushed, all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body, her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses, little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Only through annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about someday, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Are you a passenger on a ghost ship or are you the pilot?

We are all on pilgrimage in the journey of ife. We are passing through the earth but once, it should be sacred bliss.

It would be a stretch to say that I have completely abandoned my left-directed thinking. It is impossible to change that dramatically in a short period of time. Not even cancer has that kind of power. And I have no intention of ignoring my left-brain signature strengths. Over the years, they have served me well, but now they need t occasionally take a passenger seat and sometimes even a back seat in my life.

Truth, says instrumentalism, is what works out, that which does what you expect it to do. The judgment is true when you can "bank" on it and not be disappointed. If, when you predict, or when you follow the lead of your idea or plan, it brings you to the ends sought for in the beginning, your judgment is true. It does not consist in agreement of ideas, or the agreement of ideas with an outside reality; neither is it an eternal something which always is, but it is a name given to ways of thinking which get the thinker where he started. As a railroad ticket is a "true" one when it lands the passenger at the station he sought, so is an idea "true," not when it agrees with something outside, but when it gets the thinker successfully to the end of his intellectual journey. Truth, reality, ideas and judgments are not things that stand out eternally "there," whether in the skies above or in the earth beneath; but they are names used to characterize certain vital stages in a process which is ever going on, the process of creation, of evolution. In that process we may speak of reality, this being valuable for our purposes; again, we may speak of truth; later, of ideas; and still again, of judgments; but because we talk about them we should not delude ourselves into thinking we can handle them as something eternally existing as we handle a specimen under the glass. Such a conception of truth and reality, the instrumentalist believes, is in harmony with the general nature of progress. He fails to see how progress, genuine creation, can occur on any other theory on theories of finality, fixity, and authority; but he believes that the idea of creation which we have sketched here gives man a vote in the affairs of the universe, renders him a citizen of the world to aid in the creation of valuable objects in the nature of institutions and principles, encourages him to attempt things "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," inspires him to the creation of "more stately mansions," and to the forsaking of his "low vaulted past." He believes that the days of authority are over, whether in religion, in rulership, in science, or in philosophy; and he offers this dynamic universe as a challenge to the volition and intelligence of man, a universe to be won or lost at man’s option, a universe not to fall down before and worship as the slave before his master, the subject before his king, the scientist before his principle, the philosopher before his system, but a universe to be controlled, directed, and recreated by man’s intelligence.

Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone”—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west—its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination—the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

Life is a fast-moving train; we’re just passengers aboard changing carriages and waiting for our unique time to disembark.

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

Daniel and the Pelican So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary. As I watched Daniel prepare for his passenger, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him from somewhere. “Have we ever met before?” I asked. “No I don’t think so,” was his reply, smiling again with warmth that would melt glaciers. I held my breath as the man crept toward the pelican. Their eyes met, and the bird meekly allowed Daniel to drape a towel over his face and place him in the cage. There was no struggle, no flapping wings and not one peep of protest--just calm. “Yes!” I shrieked with excitement when the door was latched. What had seemed a no-win situation was no longer hopeless. The pelican was finally safe. Before they drove away, I thanked my fellow rescuer for his help. “It was my pleasure, Michelle.” And he was gone. Wait a minute. How did he know my name? We didn’t introduce ourselves. I only knew his name because of his shirt. Later when I called the Sanctuary to check on the pelican, I asked if I might speak with Daniel. No one had ever heard of him.

We are all passengers travelling on journey called life.

Or maybe I should say a few things that I “like like” In that same way that in the 7th grade I knew That there was a difference between how to like a sandwich And how I like liked Katie Elbin’s pale blonde pigtails. So..I like like Vietnamese Coffee and the long wait for it to drip Drops down into my clear glass coffee mug with penguins on it. I like like that the penguins playfully dance as the black of my coffee Meets the creaminess of condensed milk. I like like the way that Gatsby read when I was twelve And thought that Romanticism and the early twenties Would be as romantic in my early twenties. As if a field of daisies would be the same as the field of Daisy’s. However, I like like the melancholic tone of my chemicals as well When they become overly emotive. Haven’t you heard the news that we’re dead? Wouldn’t it be grand to go exactly as we planned? I like like wondering if wandering is a wanderlust Or just a wanderlust? I think this was address by a Tribe Called Quest But I’ve lost just who it is whom I was promised I could trust. I like like driving with a GPS Not playing it too close to the chest Or relying on all the Redbull and Slim Jim’s Which my passenger-self digests. And I like like a gentle sadness like a reminder I can feel The realizations that this is all just so ever gosh golly really real That my dream board has visions of what I can do And that what absolutely matters is only relatively true.

Beware becoming the inadvertent passenger hurtling eagerly along a road to nowhere. Drive.

In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away.

In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away. This

Whether we find ourselves in the role of customer or client, patient or passenger, we are no longer content to be passive consumers at the far end of the industrial economy.

In 2009 Southwest Airlines was the largest airline in the world based on the number of passengers that fly the airline each year,30 and in 2011 it was not only America’s leading low-cost carrier but was also rated America’s favorite airline by Consumer Reports.31 Joe Harris, a labor lawyer for Southwest, explains that the company’s harmonious employee relations are no accident. “At Southwest, our employees come first; our customers come second; and our stockholders come third,” he said. “The rationale is pretty simple. If we treat our employees right, they’re going to treat our customers right. If our customers are treated right, they will come back and our stockholders will benefit.

During the horrifying attacks against the United States by terrorists on September 11, 2001, the country experienced the reality of criminal violence en masse. We learned of the actions taken aboard a hijacked airplane by some of its passengers that caused the plane to crash into a field instead of, perhaps, the White House or Capitol building. Americans embraced the actions the passengers took to save those who would otherwise have died-actions that required the application of violent force. The passengers had to impose their wills upon the hijackers in order to thwart their mission. I was struck by the unanimity of that public response to violence. Perhaps it was the unbelievable scale of the devastation, or the catastrophic change in our view of our safety and security, that inspired such vast support for greater enforcement measures to combat threats against America.

With every stop, the happy drunks from the Capitol hopped off and were replaced with the dark travelers of the night. The new passengers were those worn-out workers coming home from their dead end jobs or the nightcrawlers of the evening industries who were just heading out to do business. They all exuded this heavy ambience, like a collected and withheld sigh. I felt so out of place. It was a complete buzzkill.

Life's for the living, so live it, or you're better off dead.

• While a female flight attendant was serving food from the meal cart, a female passenger thrust a small bundle of trash toward her. “Take this,” the passenger demanded. Realizing that the trash was actually a used baby diaper, the attendant instructed the passenger to take it to the lavatory herself and dispose of it. “No,” the passenger replied. “You take it!” The attendant explained that she couldn’t dispose of the dirty diaper because she was serving food—handling the diaper would be unsanitary. But that wasn’t a good enough answer for the passenger. Angered by her refusal, the passenger hurled the diaper at the flight attendant. It struck her square in the head, depositing chunks of baby dung that clung like peanut butter to her hair. The two women ended up wrestling on the floor. They had to be separated by passengers. • Passengers on a flight from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stunned by the actions of one deranged passenger. He walked to the rear of the plane, then charged up the aisle, slapping passengers’ heads along the way. Next, he kicked a pregnant flight attendant, who immediately fell to the ground. As if that weren’t enough, he bit a young boy on the arm. At this point the man was restrained and handcuffed by crew members. He was arrested upon arrival. • When bad weather closed the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for several hours, departing planes were stuck on the ground for the duration. One frustrated passenger, a young woman, walked up to a female flight attendant and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.” The passenger then punched the flight attendant in the face, breaking her nose in the process. • A flight attendant returning to work after a double-mastectomy and a struggle with multiple sclerosis had a run-in with a disgruntled passenger. One of the last to board the plane, the passenger became enraged when there was no room in the overhead bin above his seat. He snatched the bags from the compartment, threw them to the floor and put his own bag in the space he had created. After hearing angry cries from passengers, the flight attendant appeared from the galley to see what the fuss was all about. When the passengers explained what happened, she turned to the offending passenger. “Sir, you can’t do that,” she said. The passenger stood up, cocked his arm and broke her jaw with one punch. • For some inexplicable reason, a passenger began throwing peanuts at a man across the aisle. The man was sitting with his wife, minding his own business. When the first peanut hit him in the face, he ignored it. After the second peanut struck him, he looked up to see who had thrown it. He threw a harsh glance at the perpetrator, expecting him to cease immediately. When a third peanut hit him in the eye, he’d had enough. “Do that again,” he warned, “and I’ll punch your lights out.” But the peanut-tossing passenger couldn’t resist. He tossed a salted Planter’s one last time. The victim got out of his seat and triple-punched the peanut-tosser so hard that witnesses heard his jaw break. The plane was diverted to the closest airport and the peanut-tosser was kicked off. • During a full flight between New York and London, a passenger noticed that the sleeping man in the window seat looked a bit pale. Sensing that something was wrong yet not wanting to wake him, the concerned passenger alerted flight attendants who soon determined that the sleeping man was dead. Apparently, he had died a few hours earlier because his body was already cold. Horrified by the prospect of sitting next to a dead man, the passenger demanded another seat. But the flight was completely full; every seat was occupied. Finally, one flight attendant had an inspiration. She approached a uniformed military officer who agreed to sit next to the dead man for the duration of the flight.

And I remember what I’ve been saying for the past three months: inspiring the followers I accidentally accumulated and using it as a platform to encourage women and girls to bet on themselves, take a chance on themselves, and do one thing that scares them every day. Shoulders back, tits out, bitch. You were born for great things.

The average passenger eats enough calories to keep them weight gain a year old for a week, a week and a half.

Or maybe I should say a few things that I “like like” In that same way that in the 7th grade I knew That there was a difference between how to like a sandwich And how I like liked Katie Elbin’s pale blonde pigtails. So..I like like Vietnamese Coffee and the long wait for it to drip Drops down into my clear glass coffee mug with penguins on it. I like like that the penguins playfully dance as the black of my coffee Meets the creaminess of condensed milk. I like like the way that Gatsby read when I was twelve And thought that Romanticism and the early twenties Would be as romantic in my early twenties. As if a field of daisies would be the same as the field of Daisy’s. However, I like like the melancholic tone of my chemicals as well When they become overly emotive. Haven’t you heard the news that we’re dead? Wouldn’t it be grand to go exactly as we planned? I like like wondering if wandering is a wanderlust Or just a wanderlust? I think this was address by a Tribe Called Quest But I’ve lost just who it is whom I was promised I could trust. I like like driving with a GPS Not playing it too close to the chest Or relying on all the Redbull and Slim Jim’s Which my passenger-self digests. And I like like a gentle sadness like a reminder I can feel The realizations that this is all just so ever gosh golly really real That my dream board has visions of what I can do And that what absolutely matters is only relatively true.

Pack lightly. Leave behind all pre-conceived notions. Choose a Fred Flinstone-like vehicle by which you will venture with a comfortable seat that will remember you always, in a color that announces you, and a horn that celebrates you. Gather traveling companions for their wisdom, humor,and warmth and the challenges they bring so that you may grow. Be welcomed by the many landscapes that know you, even when they feel new to you. Toss your shoes out the window. Imagine the stories of every aged stone passing beneath your bare feet warmed and chafed by friction. Off road. As the driver. And the passenger. In the front. And in the back. Do not end the journey until you are claimed for your next. And so you must go, taking the only one first step in every journey... Leaving.

The newer tactic of scattering bodies on city streets, as happened when Joaquín Guzmán’s goons pushed thirty-five bloody corpses (twelve of them women) off two trucks on Manuel Ávila Camacho Boulevard, near a shopping mall in the prettier part of the port city of Veracruz one day in September 2011, to terrorize their adversaries... Guzmán, known as El Chapo (Shorty) for his small stature, ran the largest airborne opera- tion in Mexico; he owned more aircraft than Aeromexico, the national air- line. Between 2006 and 2015, Mexican authorities seized 599 aircraft — 586 planes and 13 helicopters—from the Sinaloa cartel; by comparison, Aeromexico had a piddling fleet of 127 planes.... One Zeta atrocity I knew nothing about took place in 2010, in the small town of San Fernando, south of Reynosa. A roaming band of Zetas stopped two buses of migrants—men, women, and children from Central and South America, who were fleeing the violence in their countries. The Zetas demanded money. The migrants had no money. The Zetas demanded that the migrants work for them, as assassins or operatives or drug mules. The migrants refused. So they were taken to a building in the village of El Huizachal, blindfolded, their hands and legs bound, and each one was shot in the head. Seventy-two of them died. One man (from Ecuador) played dead, escaped, and raised the alarm... The gory details of this massacre became known when one of the perpetrators was arrested, Édgar Huerta Montiel, an army deserter known as El Wache, or Fat Ass. He admitted killing eleven of the migrants person- ally, in the belief (so he said) that they were working for a gang hostile to his own. A year later, near the same town, police found 47 mass graves containing 193 corpses — mostly migrants or passengers in buses hijacked and robbed while passing through this area of Tamaulipas state, about eighty miles south of the US border... But in the early 2000s headless bodies began to appear, tossed by the roadside, while human heads were displayed in public, at intersections, and randomly on the roofs of cars. This butchery was believed to be inspired by a tactic of the Guatemalan military’s elite commandos, known as Kaibiles. A man I was to meet in Matamoros, on my traverse of the border, explained how the Kaibiles were toughened by their officers. The officers encouraged recruits to raise a dog from a puppy, then, at a certain point in their training, the recruit was ordered to kill the dog and eat it.... When the Kaibiles became mercenaries in the Mexican cartels, the first beheadings occurred, the earliest known taking place in 2006: a gang in Michoacán kicked open the doors of a bar and tossed five human heads on the dance floor. Decapitations are now, according to one authority on the business, “a staple in the lexicon of violence” for Mexican cartels....

chaos in her eyes Sitting with Christine, thinking about the chaos in her eyes, his emotional chaos, plotting to lure her out for a weekend of love, he wished in a chaotic, physical logic,” I wish I could count the number of causes and their probabilities that affect your feelings about me and that will determine what kind of answer I get if I ask you out for a date.” -What? What is that you just said? (An internal voice). By knowing the causes and the probabilities of the order in which they occur, you predict emotions Is that possible? Can we treat human emotions like the weather? Are there sensors to measure our emotions across time points in our history from which we can predict our future actions and their impact on us and others? Is there a computer with enormous capacity that can collect, analyze, and predict them? Do human emotions fall within this randomness? Throughout their history, physicists have rejected the idea of a relationship between human emotions and the surrounding world. Emotions are incomprehensible, they cannot be expected, what cannot be expected cannot be measured, what cannot be measured cannot be formulated into equations, and what cannot be formulated into equations, screw it, reject it, get rid of it, it is not part of this world. These ideas were acceptable to physicists in the past before we knew that we can control the effect of randomness to some extent through control sciences, and predict it by collecting a huge amount of data through special sensors and analyzing it. What affects when a plane arrives? Wind speed and direction? Our motors compensate for this unwanted turbulence. A lightning strike could destroy it? Our lightning rods control this disturbance and neutralize its danger. Running out of fuel? We have fuel meter indicators. Engine failure? We have alternative solutions for an emergency landing. All fall under the category of control sciences, But what about the basic building blocks of an airplane model during its flight? Humans themselves! A passenger suddenly felt dizzy, and felt ill, did the pilot decide to change his destination to the nearest airport? Another angry person caused a commotion, did he cause the flight to be canceled? Our emotions are part of this world, affect it, and can be affected by, interact with. Since we can predict chaos if we have the tools to collect, measure, and analyze it, and since we can neutralize its harmful effects through control science, thus, we can certainly do the same to human emotions as we do with weather and everything else that we have been able to predict and neutralize its undesirable effect. But would we get the desired results? nobody knows… -“Not today, not today, Robert”, he spoke to himself. – If you can’t do it today, you can’t do it for a lifetime, all you have to do now is simply to ask her out and let her chaos of feelings take you wherever she wants. Unconsciously, about to make the request, his phone rang, the caller being his mother and the destination being Tel Aviv. Standing next to Sheikh Ruslan at the building door, this wall fascinated him. -The universe worked in some parts of its paint even to the point of entropy, which it broke, so it painted a very beautiful painting, signed by its greatest law, randomness. If Van Gogh was here, he would not have a nicer one. Sheikh Ruslan knocked on the door, they heard the sound of footsteps behind him, someone opened a small window from it, as soon as he saw the Sheikh until he closed it immediately, then there was a rattle in the stillness of the alley, iron locks opening. Here Robert booked a front-row seat for the night with the absurd, illogic and subconscious.

Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly run Mexican train, it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow—not that he offered any. Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash—suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk, he was taking the greatest risk of all: being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic that one really needed friends.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

We passengers through time, thereof, let us live with passion to fulfill the purposeful duty.

Poverty makes it's home in wealth

Well, you only need the light when it's burning low. Only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Only know your lover when you let her go. Only know you've been high when you're feeling low, only hate the road when you're missing home. Only know your lover when you let her go.

Yet by the early years of the new century the New York/Newport social set was growing tired of Mrs. Astor’s stiffly elegant gatherings. When a stroke diminished her faculties in 1905, Caroline Astor became a recluse, inspiring a depiction in the Edith Wharton story “After Holbein” in which “the poor old lady who was gently dying of softening of the brain … still came down every evening to her great shrouded drawing-rooms with her tiara askew on her purple wig, to receive a stream of imaginary guests.” The death of the Mrs. Astor in 1908 marked the end of an era in New York society, but it also provided an opportunity for her son and his wife to end their moribund union.