Peter Max Quotes

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded. Further predictions unreliable.

But if you really want to raise your VO2 max, you need to train this zone more specifically. Typically, for patients who are new to exercising, we introduce VO2 max training after about five or six months of steady zone 2 work.

Don't you get it?' said Max. 'You're not praying, you're just... wishing. And wishes don't come true.

Buster went bananas, running over to Paci and jumping up on his legs, begging for attention.   Paci didn’t disappoint him, either.   He bent down and baby-talked with Buster, like he was an old hand at it.   I smiled in amusement.   Paci was no wimp.   He was almost as big as Bodo and ripped to the max.   He had zero body fat, so Peter and I were able to admire his every muscle, which I noticed Peter was doing with unabashed curiosity.   I caught his attention and raised my eyebrows at him in a conspiratorial message of mutual admiration.   He smiled in return, giving me a pitiful wink that made him look like he had something stuck in both eyes.   It made me laugh. Paci looked up at me.   “Something strike you as funny?” “Yeah.   You baby-talking to a nude poodle.

Of course, exercise is not just one thing, so I break it down into its components of aerobic efficiency, maximum aerobic output (VO2 max), strength, and stability, all of which we’ll discuss in more detail.

Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro updates this refrain when he says: “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.

It's actually the fourth,' I say, 'if you count getting fired from CopyMax.' 'Which we do not.' Jo slit-eyes me. She scoops up a handful of Fritos and tosses them into her mouth. I try to keep a straight face, but it's hard when I add, 'Fired for copying your naked butt and gluing it on your boss's chair.

This study found that someone of below-average VO2 max for their age and sex (that is, between the 25th and 50th percentiles) is at double the risk of all-cause mortality compared to someone in the top quartile (75th to 97.6th percentiles). Thus, poor cardiorespiratory fitness carries a greater relative risk of death than smoking.

Today, the most prolific Hollywood studio is Netflix. More Americans get their news from social media, primarily Facebook, than from cable television.

He walked out of the cottage and into the night. He was stark naked.

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many. MAX STIRNER

There’s a saying: friends come and go, but enemies accumulate,

VO2 max represents the maximum rate at which a person can utilize oxygen. This is measured, naturally, while a person is exercising at essentially their upper limit of effort.

Max Levchin, cofundador de PayPal, dice que las startups deberían intentar que su equipo inicial fuera a nivel personal lo más parecido posible.

Ralph Peters, a conservative uber-hawk and former army intelligence officer who in early 2018 resigned in disgust as a Fox commentator. In a scorching letter of resignation leaked to BuzzFeed, he wrote, “Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.

The libertarian success manual also argues that monopolies are good, that monarchies are the most efficient form of government, and that tech founders are godlike. It has sold more than 1.25 million copies worldwide.

he has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.

This shift was part and parcel with Thiel’s other project: an attempt to impose a brand of extreme libertarianism that shifts power from traditional institutions toward startup companies and the billionaires who control them.

Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy.

This group includes Elon Musk, plus the founders of YouTube, Yelp, and LinkedIn. They would provide the capital to Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, DeepMind—now better known as Google’s world-leading artificial intelligence project—and, of course, to Facebook.

Out of the lions' den for Daniel, the prison for Peter, the whale's belly for Jonah, Goliath's shadow for David the storm for the disciples, disease for the lepers, doubt for Thomas, the grave for Lazarus, and the shackles for Paul. God gets us through stuff.

Embrace it. Accept it. Don’t resist it. Change is not only a part of life; change is a necessary part of God’s strategy. To use us to change the world, he alters our assignments. Gideon: from farmer to general; Mary: from peasant girl to the mother of Christ; Paul: from local rabbi to world evangelist. God transitioned Joseph from a baby brother to an Egyptian prince. He changed David from a shepherd to a king. Peter wanted to fish the Sea of Galilee. God called him to lead the first church. God makes reassignments.

We, like Paul, are aware of two things: We are great sinners and we need a great savior. We, like Peter, are aware of two facts: We are going down and God is standing up. So we … leave behind the Titanic of self-righteousness and stand on the solid path of God’s grace.

Someone in the bottom quartile of VO2 max for their age group (i.e., the least fit 25 percent) is nearly four times likelier to die than someone in the top quartile—and five times likelier to die than a person with elite-level (top 2.3 percent) VO2 max. That’s stunning.

In 1996, there were no tech companies among the five most valuable traded on U.S. exchanges; in 2021 the entire top five consisted of U.S. tech companies. Today, the most prolific Hollywood studio is Netflix. More Americans get their news from social media, primarily Facebook, than from cable television.

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony. This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.

All human beings are driven by "an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a position toward it." And that goes for suffering, too...."Human beings apparently want to be edified by their miseries." Sociologist Peter Berger writes, every culture has provided an "explanation of human events that bestows meaning upon the experiences of suffering and evil." Notice Berger did not say people are taught that suffering itself is good or meaningful. What Berger means rather is that it is important for people to see how the experience of suffering does not have to be a waste, and could be a meaningful though painful way to live life well. Because of this deep human "inner compulsion," every culture either must help its people face suffering or risk a loss of credibility. When no explanation at all is given- when suffering is perceived as simply senseless, a complete waste, and inescapable- victims can develop a deep, undying anger and poisonous hate called ressentiment by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and others. This ressentiment can lead to serious social instability. And so, to use sociological language, every society must provide a discourse through which its people can make sense of suffering. That discourse includes some understanding of the causes of pain as well as the proper responses to it. And with that discourse, a society equips its people for the battles of living in this world.

More than any other Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur—more so even than Jeff Bezos, or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Zuckerberg himself—he has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.

There are not many secure hospitals that can boast someone who thought he was Napoleon, but St. Cerebellum’s could field three—not to mention a handful of serial killers whose names inexplicably yet conveniently rhymed with their crimes. Notorious cannibal “Peter the Eater” was incarcerated here, as were “Sasha the Slasher” and “Mr. Browner the Serial Drowner.” But the undisputed king of rhyme-inspired serial murder was Isle of Man resident Maximilian Marx, who went under the uniquely tongue-twisting epithet “Mad Max Marx, the Masked Manxman Axman.” Deirdre Blott tried to top Max’s clear superiority by changing her name so as to become “Nutty Nora Newsome, the Knife-Wielding Weird Widow from Waddersdon,” but no one was impressed, and she was ostracized by the other patients for being such a terrible show-off.

Even after years of war, some men retained scruples about licensed homicide. [...] Lieutenant Peter Downward commanded the sniper platoon of 13 Para. He had never himself killed a man with a rifle, but one day he found himself peering at a German helmet just visible at the corner of an air-raid shelter--an enemy sniper. "I had his head spot in the middle of my telescopic sight, my safety catch was off, but I simply couldn't press the trigger. I suddenly realised that I had a young man's life in my hands, and for the cost of one round, about twopence, I could wipe out eighteen or nineteen years of human life. My dithering deliberations were brought back to earth with a bump as Kirkbride suddenly shouted: 'Go on, sir. Shoot the bastard! He's going to fire again.' I pulled the trigger and saw the helmet jerk back. I had obviously got him, and felt completely drained...What had I done?

PayPal had been a libertarian company—in Thiel’s most extreme imaginings, it had been a way to unilaterally strip governments of the power to control their own money supplies. But Thiel was, after 9/11 anyway, no longer much of a libertarian, if he’d ever been one in the first place. He was growing skeptical of democracy, of immigration, and of all other forms of globalization—and he was, just then, working on a new company to suit his new politics.

Thiel was pulled over, and the trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. The young men in the rest of the car, simultaneously relieved to have been stopped and scared of the trooper, looked at each other nervously. “Well,” Thiel responded, in his calmest, most measured baritone. “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense.” The officer said nothing. Thiel continued: “It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.

But suppose my daughters had approached me as we often approach God. “Hey, Dad, glad you’re home. Here is what I want. More toys. More candy. And can we go to Disneyland this summer?” “Whoa,” I would have wanted to say. “I’m not a waiter, and this isn’t a restaurant. I’m your father, and this is our house. Why don’t you just climb up on Daddy’s lap and let me tell you how much I love you?” Ever thought God might want to do the same with you? Oh, he wouldn’t say that to me. He wouldn’t? Then to whom was he speaking when he said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3 NIV)? Was he playing games when he said, “Nothing . . . will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ” (Rom. 8:39)? Buried in the seldom-quarried mines of the minor prophets is this jewel: The LORD your God is with you; the mighty One will save you. He will rejoice over you. You will rest in his love; he will sing and be joyful about you. (Zeph. 3:17) Don’t move too quickly through that verse. Read it again and prepare yourself for a surprise. The LORD your God is with you; the mighty One will save you. He will rejoice over you. You will rest in his love; he will sing and be joyful about you. (Zeph. 3:17) Note who is active and who is passive. Who is singing, and who is resting? Who is rejoicing over his loved one, and who is being rejoiced over? We tend to think we are the singers and God is the “singee.” Most certainly that is often the case. But apparently there are times when God wishes we would just be still and (what a stunning thought!) let him sing over us. I can see you squirming. You say you aren’t worthy of such affection? Neither was Judas, but Jesus washed his feet. Neither was Peter, but Jesus fixed him breakfast. Neither were the Emmaus-bound disciples, but Jesus took time to sit at their table. Besides, who are we to determine if we are worthy? Our job is simply to be still long enough to let him have us and let him love us.

It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission. Max Levchin, my co-founder

X gave most of its customers checking accounts, and so those customers who were able to get their mail would sometimes immediately take advantage by writing a series of bad checks. “I was thinking, ‘What the hell did I step into,’ ” said an early hire who was tasked with handling fraud. “There was no sort of risk mitigation in place.” When employees told Musk that the bank that X had partnered with to handle the checking accounts was complaining about bounced checks, Musk seemed confused by the concept. “I don’t understand,” Musk said. “If you don’t have money in your account, why would you write a check?

Girard’s big idea—which Thiel would internalize and adopt as a guiding principle, both in investing and in life—was that people are motivated, at their core, by a desire to imitate one another. We don’t want the things we want, Girard argued, because we judge them to be good; we want them because other people want them. This “mimetic desire” was universal, leading to envy and, in turn, violence. Societies had historically used scapegoating—turning the violent impulse on a single, innocent member of the community—to channel and control these feelings, providing an outlet that staved off wars and mass killings.

Peter announced: “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12 NLT). Many recoil at such definitiveness. John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 sound primitive in this era of broadbands and broad minds. The world is shrinking, cultures are blending, borders are bending; this is the day of inclusion. All roads lead to heaven, right? But can they? The sentence makes good talk-show fodder, but is it accurate? Can all approaches to God be correct? Islam says Jesus was not crucified. Christians say he was. Both can’t be right. Judaism refuses the claim of Christ as the Messiah.6 Christians accept it. Someone’s making a mistake. Buddhists look toward Nirvana, achieved after no less than 547 reincarnations.7 Christians believe in one life, one death, and an eternity of enjoying God. Doesn’t one view exclude the other? Humanists do not acknowledge a creator of life. Jesus claims to be the source of life. One of the two speaks folly. Spiritists read your palms. Christians consult the Bible. Hindus perceive a plural and impersonal God.8 Christ-followers believe “there is only one God” (1 Cor. 8:4 NLT). Somebody is wrong. And, most supremely, every non-Christian religion says, “You can save you.” Jesus says, “My death on the cross saves you.” How can all religions lead to God when they are so different? We don’t tolerate such illogic in other matters. We don’t pretend that all roads lead to London or all ships sail to Australia.

Another former chess player shared his own fond memory of Thiel from this era. Around the spring of 1988, the team was driving to Monterey for a tournament, with Thiel behind the wheel of the Rabbit. They took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that crosses the Santa Cruz Mountains and is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous. The team was in no particular hurry, but Thiel drove as if he were a man possessed. He navigated the turns like Michael Andretti, weaving in and out of lanes, nearly rear-ending cars as he slipped past them, and seemed to be flooring the accelerator for large portions of the trip. Somewhat predictably, the lights of a California Highway Patrol cruiser eventually appeared in his rearview. Thiel was pulled over, and the trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. The young men in the rest of the car, simultaneously relieved to have been stopped and scared of the trooper, looked at each other nervously. “Well,” Thiel responded, in his calmest, most measured baritone. “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense.” The officer said nothing. Thiel continued: “It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.” The officer looked at Thiel and the geeks in the beater car and decided the whole thing wasn’t worth his time. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. “I don’t remember any of the games we played,” said the man, now in his fifties, who’d been in the passenger seat. “But I will never forget that drive.

A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it. The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

The ultimate proof of providence is the death of Christ on the cross. No deed was more evil. No other day was so dark. Yet God not only knew of the crucifixion; he ordained it. As Peter told the murderers, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (Acts 2:23–24 NIV, emphasis mine).

Even the newest military planes had checklists that appeared on touch screens. If a hydraulic pump failed, a message would pop up showing specific actions the pilot should take. On the 737, a light showing “low hydraulic pressure” might illuminate with no further explanation. Pilots would have to rely on memory or turn to their paper handbook. “Training issue,” the Boeing executive responded to Reed, in rejecting such changes. If Boeing had been building a brand- new plane, it would have been required to have the electronic checklist. But because the MAX was being examined as an amendment to the original type certificate awarded in 1967, managers could pursue an exception. The MAX was actually the thirteenth version of the plane, counting all the variants along the way— the official application would call it an update of the 737- 100,

The water's too deep to stand in now— ...feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.

Peter stretches during his morning shower: “It’s mostly my lower body, and then I’ll go through a breathing exercise as well, and [an] affirmational mantra. . . . [The breathing exercise] is an accelerated deep breathing just to oxygenate and stretch my lungs. There are two elements that tie very much to human longevity. It’s strange. . . . One is those people who floss and, second, those people who have a higher VO2 max.

Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams. They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world.

I never knew revenge could be beautiful,” Max said. “It will be.” Ryan smiled and raised his glass, “Worthy of its place in poetry books and art galleries.

The far-right ideas had been there for as long as the tech industry had existed—all the way back to the founding of Stanford University. But it had taken Peter Thiel to bring those ideas above the surface, and then to weaponize them.

one capable of producing new forms of entertainment, new mediums of communication, and a better way to hail a taxi, but one that is also indifferent to the addiction, radicalization, and economic privation that have come with these advances.

Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2 max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a notch less intense. I do these workouts on my road bike, mounted to a stationary trainer, or on a rowing machine, but running on a treadmill (or a track) could also work. The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort.

MaxQ

Of course, exercise is not just one thing, so I break it down into its components of aerobic efficiency, maximum aerobic output (VO2 max), strength, and stability,

only sport known to have inspired an indignant left-wing poem. It was written by one Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn in 1915. The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play. Just show me an indignant left-wing poem about softball or bungee jumping. And our local mill has been converted to a shopping mall, so the kids are still there. Golf is also the only sport God is known to play. God and Saint Peter are out on Sunday morning. On the first hole God drives into a water hazard. The waters part and God chips onto the green. On the second hole God takes a tremendous whack and the ball lands ten feet from the pin. There’s an earthquake, one side of the green rises up, and the ball rolls into the cup. On the third hole God lands in a sand trap. He creates life. Single-cell organisms develop into fish and then amphibians. Amphibians crawl out of the ocean and evolve into reptiles, birds, and furry little mammals. One of those furry little mammals runs into the sand trap, grabs God’s ball in its mouth, scurries over, and drops it in the hole. Saint Peter looks at God and says, “You wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around?” And golf courses are beautiful. Many people think mature men have no appreciation for beauty except in immature women. This isn’t true, and, anyway, we’d rather be playing golf. A golf course is a perfect example of Republican male aesthetics—no fussy little flowers, no stupid ornamental shrubs, no exorbitant demands for alimony, just acre upon acre of lush green grass that somebody else has to mow. Truth, beauty, and even poetry are to be found in golf. Every man, when he steps up to the tee, feels, as Keats has it … Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. That is, the men were silent. Cortez was saying, “I can get on in two, easy. A three-wood drive, a five-iron from the fairway, then a two-putt max. But if I hook it, shit, I’m in the drink.” EAT THE RICH

When have cops not asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or "community outreach program funds"? Those pussies are almost as bad as soldiers, always whining about never having "what they need", but do they have to risk their jobs by raising taxes? Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why they're fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?

People have to die before Boeing will change things,

Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2 max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a notch less intense. I do these workouts on my road bike, mounted to a stationary trainer, or on a rowing machine, but running on a treadmill (or a track) could also work. The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort. Then ride or jog four minutes easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down to below about one hundred beats per minute. Repeat this four to six times and cool down.[*4]

Once ruled by engineers who thumbed their noses at Wall Street, Boeing had reinvented itself into one of the most shareholder-friendly creatures of the market. It celebrated managers for cost cutting, co-opted regulators with heaps of money, and pressured suppliers with Walmart-style tactics.

All stem at least in part from the failed belief that corporations will police themselves and shower us in riches if they’re just left alone to do so (and are lightly taxed all the while).

The Clinton administration downsized federal agencies and introduced market-based performance metrics as part of what it called “reinventing government.

Boeing had sought to keep cost data out of the hands of rank-and-file engineers, to keep the information from compromising their designs; now the opposite was true. Boeing wanted them all to make decisions with the cold eye of a Jack Welch or a Harry Stonecipher. After finishing the course, engineers were meant to “understand, God, that program has to be produceable, I can’t put every bell and whistle on it,” said Boeing’s vice president of learning, Steve Mercer, the former deputy at Crotonville.

Airbus, a consortium of European manufacturers it had always derided as a glorified jobs program, actually had a cost advantage over Boeing. Its factories produced planes 12 percent to 15 percent cheaper than Boeing’s, the study reported. Ironically, this was in part because of rigid labor laws in Europe, which made layoffs more expensive and, in places like Germany, forced the involvement of labor unions in management decisions. As a consequence, Airbus was quicker to adopt automated machinery, but also more likely to train and develop its workers rather than to fire them.

By the count of a former Boeing executive who scoured incident reports for a congressional committee, one in twenty-five MAX planes experienced some sort of safety issue in the months after they were delivered.

Agriculture Department in 2019 quietly cut the number of inspectors in pork plants by more than half. Finding defects—feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders—was mostly left to the companies themselves, much in the way that the FAA relied on Boeing’s own employees to ensure aircraft safety.

It emerged that Douglas engineers had known the design was vulnerable to a catastrophic failure, and indeed, two years earlier, a near disaster had ensued on a flight over Windsor, Ontario, which also lost a cargo door. The pilot had been able to land the plane in that case. Instead of fixing the issue immediately, McDonnell Douglas had convinced the FAA to let it add a support plate over time to the doors—a “gentlemen’s agreement” revealed in the congressional hearings. Records at Douglas showed that the support plate had been added to the Turkish Airlines plane, when it had not. Three company inspectors had signed off on the nonexistent fix.

The acquisition of McDonnell Douglas a year earlier had brought hordes of cutthroat managers, trained in the win-at-all-costs ways of defense contracting, into Boeing’s more professorial ranks in the misty Puget Sound. A federal mediator who refereed a strike by Boeing engineers two years later described the merger privately as “hunter killer assassins” meeting Boy Scouts.

Some of the very people who ran McDonnell Douglas into the ground resurrected the same penny-pinching policies that sank their old company. Borrowing a page from another flawed idol, Jack Welch’s General Electric, they executed what today might be called the standard corporate playbook: anti-union, regulation-light, outsourcing-heavy. But pro-handout, at least when it comes to tax breaks and lucrative government contracts.

a dozen industrial executives in the country who earned more than $1 million in 1978. (Adjusted for inflation, his pay was equivalent to $5 million in 2019—less than a quarter of the average CEO compensation of $21.3 million that year.)

The tax rate on upper brackets of income fell from 70 percent to 50 percent (and later to 33 percent), causing a 9 percent drop in federal revenue in two years.

Rather than investing in new aircraft, Boeing’s leaders poured more than $30 billion of cash into stock buybacks during the MAX’s development, enriching shareholders and ultimately themselves. Muilenburg made more than $100 million as CEO, and he left with an additional $60 million golden parachute.

That consensus was just starting to fray when Milton Friedman, the Reaganites’ favorite economist, argued what was then still the contrarian viewpoint in the New York Times Magazine in 1970: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

When Fortune interviewed Collins in 2000, he was already starting to rethink the idea. “If in fact there’s a reverse takeover, with the McDonnell ethos permeating Boeing, then Boeing is doomed to mediocrity,” he said. “There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company. If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.

Do you imagine that simply because one madman is gone, there are no more? Yes, Robespierre is dead. And Marat. Saint-Just. Hébert. But there are always more, waiting on the wings. History always throws off these power-hungry monsters. It’s because of people like them that this little boy suffers.” I think about another Max. And another little boy. I remember the future. “Maximilien R. Peters! Incorruptible, ineluctable, and indestructible! It’s time to start the revolution, baby!” he shouted. I remember the other people who lived with him in the Charles. Poor people, damaged people. I think of how I walked past them every day, not seeing them, not caring. Until it was too late. And I think of how these people, Amadé’s friends, amuse themselves all night long with mannered dances and witty conversation, shutting themselves off from the world, while a helpless child slowly dies. And I say, “No, not because of Robespierre and Marat. Or people like them. Because of people like us.

Lord, help us to see that what you ask of us is for our own good. Help us believe that the shortest distance between us and the life we long for is total obedience to you. Help us be courageous and consistent in choosing to be obedient to you. Amen.

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

If there’s one thing I’m the world’s greatest expert on, it’s how it feels to be me. And

You guys be safe,” said Veek. She gave Nate a crooked smile. “Don’t do anything too stupid, Shaggy.” “Like going down into a hundred-year-old mine shaft?” “Yeah,” she said. “That’d pretty much max out the stupid-meter.

Win hung up. Five minutes later Myron entered the restaurant. Cingle didn’t disappoint. She was curvy to the max, built like a Marvel comic drawing come to life. Myron walked up to Peter Chin, the owner, to say hello. Peter frowned at him.

[...] but personally if I never drink another crocodile pee I shall be a happy man.’ ‘Crocodile pee?’ ‘I always assumed that that was the main ingredient in Gatorade, but I may be wrong.

Let grace microwave your cold heart. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). When you do, you’ll find yourself joining the ranks of the truly wealthy. You’ll be rich with grace.

I’m Peter, this is-” “No,” Max said loudly as he elbowed his way between our new friends and us. “Not happening,” Caleb agreed forcefully,

For example, a thirty-five-year-old man with average fitness for his age—a VO2 max in the mid-30s—should be able to run at a ten-minute mile pace (6 mph). But by age seventy, only the very fittest 5 percent of people will still be able to manage this. Similarly, an average forty-five- to fifty-year-old will be able to climb stairs briskly (VO2 max = 32), but at seventy-five, such a feat demands that a person be in the top tier of their age group.

turns out that peak aerobic cardiorespiratory fitness, measured in terms of VO2 max, is perhaps the single most powerful marker for longevity. VO2 max represents the maximum rate at which a person can utilize oxygen. This is measured, naturally, while a person is exercising at essentially their upper limit of effort. (If you’ve ever had this test done, you will know just how unpleasant it is.) The more oxygen your body is able to use, the higher your VO2 max.

So many changes, he reflected. So many fold catastrophes in pursuit of new equilibria.

The world is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses. —Utah Phillips

He’s a sociopath. He wasn’t born to it. There are ways of telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short attention span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech.

Overhead, the skin of the ocean writhes like dim mercury. It tilts and dips and scrolls past in an endless succession of crests and troughs, twisting a cool orb glowing on the other side, tying it into playful dancing knots. A few moments later they break through the surface and look onto a world of sea and moonlit sky.

doesn’t have much of what you’d call a conscience, and if that’s your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn’t choose it.” “What difference does it make?” Alyx demands. “It’s not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover.” “So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?” It’s a pretty good point,

But that’s not all of it. That’s just the rationale that floats on the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There’s another reason, deeper and more ominous:

Thank you, South Fucking Africa. What was it with those people? They’d been a typical Third World country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalized like all the others. Why couldn’t they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it—reconciliation panels? It made no sense. Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since Saint Nelson the S’Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accommodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they’d been sneaking under the world’s guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.

And yet, that didn’t mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring. Odd, though. You’d have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.

In rejecting the safety enhancement, managers twice cited concerns about the “cost and potential (pilot) training impact.

Michaelis asked if any alert would tell them when the sensors had failed. “On your airplane, yes,” Sinnett answered. Without mentioning that Boeing had botched the software implementation on other planes, he explained that American had purchased the optional angle-of-attack indicator, which Lion Air had not. Had it been Michaelis’s plane, a little flag notice would have popped up alerting him to disagreement between the AoA vanes, and mechanics would have fixed the sensor on the ground. “So you would not have taken the airplane,” he said.

staffers in the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service concluded there might be fifteen more MAX crashes without a software fix, based on the future size of the fleet, the hours of anticipated flight, and a rough estimate that one in every hundred pilots might have trouble handling the rare sensor failure.

Team Rogue.” It roughly meant doing whatever had to be done, even pushing ethical limits. It’s unlikely that Thiel knew about Team Rogue, but Chmieliauskas said that Palantir’s senior leaders certainly did, and in any case Chmieliauskas was following one of the most important rules of the Thielverse: Ignore the rules when necessary.

When a reporter noted that many other online payment companies had chosen to comply with federal banking regulations—by, for instance, asking for social security numbers and verifying customers’ addresses before allowing them to make payments—Thiel called them “insane” and suggested that was why they were growing so slowly.

service that turned every high school and college student into an intellectual property thief

Today, the use of unsustainable or ethically dubious tricks to get a startup off the ground is widely accepted—even celebrated in some circles of tech—and has been widely credited to the growth hacks that Thiel and his peers developed at PayPal.

His worldview is that if you get one big thing right, and move hard with conviction, then nothing else matters,” said an early Clarium employee.

Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jungle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’ ” That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel’s followers have learned—the real meaning of “move fast and break things.

I thought that a lot of the conventional ways people competed resulted in too many people [doing] conventional things,” he would say years later. “Then you end up in very competitive dynamics, and then even when you win it’s not quite worth it. You might get a slightly better paying job than you otherwise would, but you sort of have to sell your soul. That doesn’t sound like a very good economic or moral tradeoff.

One of Thiel’s favorite books was The Sovereign Individual, a little-known political screed—that is, until Thiel started talking it up. The book, published in 1997 by a venture capitalist, James Dale Davidson, and a journalist, William Rees-Mogg, is a cyber-libertarian manifesto that predicts the end of the nation state. The book, which was reissued in 2020 with