Printing Business Quotes

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The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Additive manufacturing has a major role to play in the circular economy.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
3D Printing has a major role to play in the circular economy.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Unlike blowing or forming glass, resulting in smooth and continuous surfaces; the printing of glass enables high levels of control over shape and optical properties.
Neri Oxman
I really hope so. Partly because, yes, we're duty bound to produce heirs. But also... I want everything with you, America. I want the holidays and the birthdays, the busy seasons and lazy weekends. I want peanut butter finger-prints on my desk. I want inside jokes and fights and everything. I want a life with you." - Maxon Schreave
Kiera Cass (The One (The Selection, #3))
Education is what you get from reading the small print; experience is what you get from not reading it.
Common
Business cards, of course, are not proof of anything. Anyone can go to a print shop and have cards made that say anything they like. The king of Denmark can order business cards that say he sells golf balls. Your dentist can order business cards that say she is your grandmother. In order to escape from the castle of an enemy of mine, I once had cards printed that said I was an admiral in the French navy. Just because something is typed - whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book - this does not mean it is true.
Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #3))
I nodded. “Where’s your hunter?” She flinched. “He went home. We thought it would be best.” Her eyes went from worried to warning. “He’s under Drake protection.” “So am I, or so I’ve been led to understand.” “Of course you are,” Lucy said, her nose pressed to the window. “Misunderstanding. No big deal.” Solange quirked a half smile. “You might try complete sentences, Lucy.” “Can’t. Busy.” I was curious despite myself. “What are you doing?” “Drooling,” Solange explained fondly. “I totally am,” Lucy admitted, unrepentant. “Just look at them.” Lucy moved over to give me space. She was watching five of the seven Drake boys repairing the outside wall of the farmhouse, under our window." "Solange leaned back against the wall, bored. “Are you done yet?” “Hell no,” Lucy said. She’d left nose prints on the glass. Nicholas smirked up at her. She blushed. “Ooops. Busted.” “I told you they could hear your heartbeat,” Solange said. “Even from up here.” “I can’t help it. Even if they all know they’re pretty and are insufferably arrogant,” she added louder. “Can they hear that?” “Yes.” “Good.” She glanced at me. “Yummy, right?” “I’m sure Isabeau would rather recover, not ogle my brothers,” Solange said. “You remember how stressed you were after the Hypnos?” “Please,” Lucy scoffed. “This is totally soothing.
Alyxandra Harvey (Blood Feud (Drake Chronicles, #2))
The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away.
Fulton J. Sheen
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed." Hubbard, Elbert
Brandon Collier
On the prow of the wagon, in an attempt to attract business among the Quarterites, Ignatius taped a sheet of Big Chief paper on which he had printed in crayon: TWELVE INCHES (12) OF PARADISE. So far no one had responded to its message.
John Kennedy Toole
I looked into his sandy brown eyes, at one with the hair. At the business- like outward presentation of the man who daily printed sneers, innuendo, distrust and spite and spoke without showing a trace of them. 'Off the record,' I said,'bash his face in'.
Dick Francis
It seems important to me that beginning writers ponder this—that since 1964, I have never had a book, story or poem rejected that was not later published. If you know what you are doing, eventually you will run into an editor who knows what he/she is doing. It may take years, but never give up. Writing is a lonely business not just because you have to sit alone in a room with your machinery for hours and hours every day, month after month, year after year, but because after all the blood, sweat, toil and tears you still have to find somebody who respects what you have written enough to leave it alone and print it. And, believe me, this remains true, whether the book is your first novel or your thirty-first.
Joseph Hansen
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Somebody told me when I first got in this business that people believe what they read until somebody prints something that contradicts it. Then they believe both.
Charles Martin (Unwritten)
In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
There’s no need for me to message Zahra, but it feels weird to let a whole day go by without talking. Between my busy schedule and her lack of text messages, I’ve grown restless as the hours have gone by. It’s a warning that I’m becoming dependent on her company. Yet I can’t find it in me to stop.
Lauren Asher (The Fine Print (Dreamland Billionaires, #1))
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
When we apply additive manufacturing at scale and fully integrate it into society from a systems perspective, it can revolutionize the flow of products in the supply chains. Logistically, we can get products to their destination instantly and with greater efficiency.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
So, in 1748 at age 42—which would turn out to be precisely the midpoint of his life—he retired and turned over the operation of his printing business to his foreman, David Hall.
Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life)
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted - golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasures, crowns, and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Sob - when he started back home.
O. Henry (The Four Million)
3d printers use less material, labor and energy yet they're more effective than substractive manufacturing machines. At full potential and systems scale, they achieve greater results in less time. When something does more with less, it's a good investment. And when that's employed on a systems level, theres a multiplicative benefit effect.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such." "You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness." "Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?” “Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.” “Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps. Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died.
Leon Uris (Exodus)
On Editors: "... The chief qualification of ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed as writers. Don't think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures of literature. The editors, the sub-editors, associate editors, most of them, and the manuscript readers for the magazines and book-publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and failed. And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its way into print–they, who have proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius. And after them comes the reviewers, just so many more failures. Don't tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to write poetry and fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why, the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil....
Jack London (Martin Eden)
THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic." Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Glorious,' said Steerpike, 'is a dictionary word. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. In dead and shackled language, my dears, you *are* glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sounds that might convince you of what I really think of you, as you sit there in your purple splendour, side by side! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me. I can make no sound, dear ladies, that is apt.' 'You could try,' said Clarice. 'We aren't busy.' She smoothed the shining fabric of her dress with her long, lifeless fingers. 'Impossible,' replied the youth, rubbing his chin. 'Quite impossible. Only believe in my admiration for your beauty that will one day be recognized by the whole castle. Meanwhile, preserve all dignity and silent power in your twin bosoms.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
his business. On Denman's death he returned to his former trade, and shortly set up a printing house of his own from which he published "The Pennsylvania Gazette," to which he contributed many essays, and which he made a medium for agitating a variety of local reforms. In 1732 he began to issue his famous "Poor Richard's Almanac" for the enrichment of which he borrowed or composed those pithy utterances of worldly wisdom which are the basis of a large part of his popular reputation.
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
Providing value in Product form is valuable because Products can be Duplicated . This book was only written once, but individual copies can be printed and delivered millions of times to readers all around the world. As a result, products tend to Scale better than other forms of value, since they can be Duplicated and/or Multiplied (all discussed later).
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
She knew deep down that magazines were a dinosaur, and her real job was to dodge the asteroid as long as possible.
Camille Pagán (Good for You)
When adding descriptions to your online listings or printed materials, lead with benefits and follow with features.
James Dillehay (How to Price Crafts and Things You Make to Sell -- Formulas and Strategies for Arriving at Profitable Craft Prices for Selling Online or Off, Wholesale or Retail)
(My wife has a theory, but I won’t put it in print. Honestly, some days I feel more pity than disdain for the man.)
Eric W. Saeger (Russian Nazi Troll Bots! : The Busy Person’s Guide to How Trump’s Trolls Won the Internet, What’s Ahead, and What You Can Do)
Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
... a man could build whatever monuments he wanted in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, and business, but if they come at the expense of his children, then he has failed. Once the attention fades and the crowds stop cheering his name and his accomplishments are little more than fine print in a history book, the only thing that truly survives him is his child. That is his legacy. That is what defines him. All else is but a footnote.
Steve Pemberton (A CHANCE IN THE WORLD: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home)
Be not ashamed to be helped; for it is thy business to do thy duty like a soldier in the assault on a town. How then, if being lame thou canst not mount up on the battlements alone, but with the help of another it is possible?
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Giant 8.5" x 11" Size: Large, Clear Print & Pictures - Complete & Unabridged! (University of Life Library))
The Diamond Cutter is the oldest dated book in the world that was printed, rather than being written out by hand. The British Museum holds a copy that is dated A.D. 868, or about 600 years before the Gutenberg Bible was produced.
Michael Roach (The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life)
The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You’re just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps only) strategy for growth.
Seth Godin (Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable)
Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)
Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
In effect, Wisconsin politicians forced the owners of these 8,000 small, family-owned and taxpaying businesses to turn over a month’s profits so the money could be given to one of the biggest companies in the world, General Electric, and its partners to make a film glamorizing violent theft.
David Cay Johnston (The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind)
What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase’s credit card business is not much more than a gigantic welfare fraud scheme. These companies borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed at rock-bottom rates, then turn around and lend it out to the world at 5, 10, 15, 20 percent, as credit cards and mortgages, boat loans and aircraft loans, and so on. If you pay it back, great, it’s a 500 percent or 1,000 percent or 4,000 percent profit for the bank. If you don’t pay it back, the company can put your name in the hopper to be sued. A $5,000 debt on a credit card for the now-defunct Circuit City, which was actually a Chase card, became a $13,000 or $14,000 debt by the time the bank finished applying fees and penalties. Just like a welfare application, you have to read the fine print. “They make more on lawsuits than they make on credit interest,” says Linda.
Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
It takes a lot of intelligence to see “I am stupid.” The difference between a stupid person and an intelligent one is that an intelligent person knows he is stupid, but an idiot does not. Look at it in terms of existence and you. If you look at with what organization, capability and certainty a simple ant is conducting its life, you will see that you are quite stupid. Have you seen, even a simple ant – such a tiny thing – is dead sure of what he wants with his life. He knows what to eat, what not to eat, what is nourishing for him, what is not. He does not read that micro-print on the back of the package. He just knows what he wants.
Sadguru (Mind is your Business and Body the Greatest Gadget (2 Books in 1))
Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there's no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn't the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard's Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don't seem so essayistic. They seem more like means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we'd never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.
Jonathan Franzen (The End of the End of the Earth: Essays)
Frugal and industrious, with a network of Junto members to steer business his way, Franklin was doing modestly well as one of three printers in a town that would naturally have supported only two. But he had learned from his apprentice days in Boston that true success would come if he had not only a printing operation but also his own content and distribution network. His competitor Andrew Bradford published the town’s only newspaper, which was paltry but profitable, and that helped Bradford’s printing business by giving him clout with the merchants and politicians. He also was the postmaster, which gave him some control over what papers got distributed plus first access to news from afar.
Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life)
The thing that impressed me most was that Eddie should have been bitter and he was not. He had used the incident for his own entertainment and mine. Whether he also used it for my edification I do not know. But I thought about this old man then. And his people. Thought about how they’d been slaughtered, almost wiped out, forced to live on settlements that were more like concentration camps, then poked, prodded, measured and taped, had photos of their sacred business printed in colour in heavy academic anthropological texts, had their sacred secret objects stolen and taken to museums, had their potency and integrity drained from them at every opportunity, had been reviled and misunderstood by almost every white in the country, and then finally left to rot with their cheap booze and our diseases and their deaths, and I looked at this marvellous old half-blind codger laughing his socks off as if he had never experienced any of it, never been the butt of a cruel ignorant bigoted contempt, never had a worry in his life, and I thought, OK old man, if you can, me too.
Robyn Davidson (Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback)
Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)
I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Besides the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.
Ted Hughes (The Thought-Fox)
He directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets, including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.
Brent Schlender (Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
All communities require sustainable ways to make a living. Economic sustainability involves: Small-scale business, crafts, and services that create maximum diversity of economic base and a rich ecology of financial, income and job opportunities. Possibilities include cottage industries, local services, education, printing and publishing, trading, small-scale manufacturing, consulting, shops and cooperatives.
Christine Connelly (Sustainable Communities: Lessons from Aspiring Eco-Villages)
In the end, Miss Margitan settled for a formal apology and two weeks of detention for the bad boy who had dared call her Maggot in print. It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.
Mike Huckabee (God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: and the Dad-Gummed Gummint That Wants to Take Them Away)
Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school . . . ? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment. Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that: “The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.” For our young children, what else is there to wish for?
Erika Christakis (The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups)
Newspapers were in rapid decline in cities large and small across the country, their business model devastated by the triple whammy of first a company (Craigslist) that offered for free one of their main products (classified ads), and later a company that eviscerated the department stores that bought many of the print ads that sustained newspapers (Amazon), and then a couple companies that siphoned off the digital ad revenue that would replace lost print ads (Google and Facebook).
Alec MacGillis (Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America)
As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.'' Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.
Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads)
Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. the wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a' gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
gold standard,” which the United States had dropped in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1920s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.1 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.
Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
A pamphlet the size of a business envelope caught her eye. On its cover was a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro; above the drawing was printed The Black Plague. Its author was somebody with several academic degrees after his name. She opened the pamphlet, sat down in her father’s chair, and began reading. When she had finished, she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail, and walked into the kitchen. She held the pamphlet in front of her aunt. “What is this thing?” she said.
Harper Lee (Go Set a Watchman)
Though I can’t be sure, I suspect that at some point about thirty years ago a cleverly sadistic and antibusiness consultant decided that the best way to really screw up companies was to convince them that what they needed was a convoluted, jargony, and all-encompassing declaration of intent. The more times those declarations used phrases like “world class,” “shareholder value,” and “adding value,” the better. And if companies would actually print those declarations and hang them in their lobbies and break rooms for public viewing, well, that would be a real coup.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
His apprentice, David Harry, whom I had instructed while I work'd with him, set up in his place at Philadelphia, having bought his materials. I was at first apprehensive of a powerful rival in Harry, as his friends were very able, and had a good deal of interest. I therefore propos'd a partner-ship to him which he, fortunately for me, rejected with scorn. He was very proud, dress'd like a gentleman, liv'd expensively, took much diversion and pleasure abroad, ran in debt, and neglected his business; upon which, all business left him; and, finding nothing to do, he followed Keimer to Barbadoes, taking the printing-house with him.
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack. Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue, Settling and stirring like blown paper Or the hands of an invalid. The wan Sun manages to strike such tin glints From the linked ponds that my eyes wince And brim; the city melts like sugar. A crocodile of small girls Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms, Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick, One child drops a carrette of pink plastic; None of them seem to notice. Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off. Now silence after silence offers itself. The wind stops my breath like a bandage. Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge Swaddles roof and tree. It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank. I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all. Already your doll grip lets go. The tumulus, even at noon, guargs its black shadow: You know me less constant, Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird. I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy. These faithful dark-boughed cypresses Brood, rooted in their heaped losses. Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat. I lose sight of you on your blind journey, While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets Unpool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them, Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem. The day empties its images Like a cup of a room. The moon’s crook whitens, Thin as the skin seaming a scar. Now, on the nursery wall, The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow. The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus Light up. Each rabbit-eared Blue shrub behind the glass Exhales an indigo nimbus, A sort of cellophane balloon. The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife. Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light; I enter the lit house.
Sylvia Plath
Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.
James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
All you have to do to make money in Indonesia is to figure out what no one else is doing,' Ade said. It made me think of how often I had noticed copy-cat businesses in smaller Indonesian towns. I was caught out by it early on. In Waikabubak, for example, every third shop prints photos. Even the little tailor opposite the market has a sideline in photo printing. This made me lazy; having promised to print photos and send them to people before I left Waikabubak, I thought: I'll do it in the next town I go to. But the next town is all pharmacies- there's not a single photo printer. Here it's wall-to-wall perfume sellers, there it's all hair salons... 'People see a business doing well, and they just copy it,' said Ade. 'The concept of market saturation is not well understood.
Elizabeth Pisani (Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation)
A few years ago, most of these authors wouldn’t have been published at all—and that would have been enough to discourage many of them from writing a book in the first place. But today, the economics of publishing have fallen so low that nearly everyone can do it. That means people can write books for whatever reason they want, and they don’t need to depend on some publisher deciding if the book is worth taking to market. The effect of this is being felt throughout the industry, right up to the giant booksellers. In 2005, Barnes & Noble sold 20 percent more unique titles than it had in 2004, something its CEO, Steve Riggio, attributes to three forces: (1) the efficiencies of print-on-demand, which keeps more books in print; (2) the increase in the number of smaller and independent publishers; and (3) self-publishing.
Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More)
Direct marketers, of course, realize that measurement is the key to success. Figure out what works, and do it more! Mass marketers have always resisted this temptation. When my old company approached the head of one of the largest magazine publishers in the world and pitched a technology that would allow advertisers to track who saw their ads and responded to them, he was aghast. He realized that this sort of data could kill his business. He knew that his clients didn’t want the data because then their jobs would get a lot more complex. Measurement means admitting what’s broken so you can fix it. Mass-media advertising, whether it’s on TV or in print, is all about emotion and craft, not about fixing mistakes. One reason the Internet ad boomlet faded so fast is that it forced advertisers to measure – and to admit what was going wrong.
Seth Godin (Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable)
they’re bloody good ones too. I thought we’d finished with this nonsense last year when we raided that house out on the Limerick road and found the printing press. But these are much higher quality. It wouldn’t have been detected at all except for the banknote counting machine that spat it out.” “Where did they come from?” Lyons said. “Oh, the usual. These two came from different pubs in the city when the landlord was doing the lodgement after the weekend, and I’m sure we’re not finished with them yet. I’ve put out a notification to all the pubs and restaurants to be sure to use their pens on all twenties, but you know yourself, when they are busy they don’t bother. Will you take Eamon out to the bars that these came from and see if there’s any CCTV, or if the barmen remember anything about who might have passed them?” Hays said. “Yes sure, no problem. I never need much encouragement to go calling on pubs, as you know!” Lyons said. *
David Pearson (Murder on the West Coast (Galway Homicide: Hays & Lyons #3))
History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 20-30 points whiter than tech companies actually deeply care about this? Or is it because after the 2009-era collapse of print media revenue, media corporations struggled for a business model, found that certain words drove traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?12 After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited from slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom for decades, ran a succession process featuring only three cis straight white male cousins, and ended up with a publisher who just happened to be the son of the previous guy.13
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow tycoon John D. Rockefeller were often called 'robber barons'. Newspapers said they were evil, and ran cartoons showing Vanderbilt as a leech sucking the blood of the poor. Rockefeller was depicted as a snake. What the newspapers printed stuck--we still think of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller as 'robber barons'. But it was a lie. They were neither robbers nor barons. They weren't robbers, because they didn't steal from anyone, and they weren't barons--they were born poor. Vanderbilt got rich by pleasing people. He invented ways to make travel and shipping things cheaper. He used bigger ships, faster ships, served food onboard. People liked that. And the extra volume of business he attracted allowed him to lower costs. He cut the New York--Hartford fare from $8 to $1. That gave consumers more than any 'consumer group' ever has. It's telling that the 'robber baron' name-calling didn't come from consumers. It was competing businessmen who complained, and persuaded the media to join in. Rockefeller got rich selling oil. First competitors and then the government called him a monopolist, but he wasn't--he had competitors. No one was forced to buy his oil. Rockefeller enticed people to buy it by selling it for less. That's what his competitors hated. He found cheaper ways to get oil from the ground to the gas pump. This made life better for millions. Working-class people, who used to go to bed when it got dark, could suddenly afford fuel for their lanterns, so they could stay up and read at night. Rockefeller's greed might have even saved the whales, because when he lowered the price of kerosene and gasoline, he eliminated the need for whale oil. The mass slaughter of whales suddenly stopped. Bet your kids won't read 'Rockefeller saved the whales' in environmental studies class. Vanderbilt's and Rockefeller's goal might have been just to get rich. But to achieve that, they had to give us what we wanted.
John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
In 1994 very, very few people had heard of the internet. It was used at that time mostly by scientists and physicists. We used it a little bit at D. E. Shaw for some things but not much, and I came across the fact that the web—the World Wide Web—was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if it’s baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big. I concluded that I should come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it and keep working to improve it. So I made a list of products I might sell online. I started ranking them, and I picked books because books are super unusual in one respect: there are more items in the book category than in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. The biggest bookstores had only 150,000 titles. So the founding idea of Amazon was to build a universal selection of books in print. That’s what I did: I hired a small team, and we built the software. I moved to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world at that time was nearby in a town called Roseberg, Oregon, and also because of the recruiting pool available from Microsoft.
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually, ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture. It is also the difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one then lived in Philadelphia; a person of note, an elderly man, with a wise look and a very grave manner of speaking; his name was Samuel Mickle. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes now existing, or that were soon to exist, that he left me half melancholy. Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it. This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
more than anything.” He turned to Jean Louise. “Seven-thirty tonight and no Landing. We’ll go to the show.” “Okay. Where’re you all going?” “Courthouse. Meeting.” “On Sunday?” “Yep.” “That’s right, I keep forgetting all the politicking’s done on Sunday in these parts.” Atticus called for Henry to come on. “Bye, baby,” he said. Jean Louise followed him into the livingroom. When the front door slammed behind her father and Henry, she went to her father’s chair to tidy up the papers he had left on the floor beside it. She picked them up, arranged them in sectional order, and put them on the sofa in a neat pile. She crossed the room again to straighten the stack of books on his lamp table, and was doing so when a pamphlet the size of a business envelope caught her eye. On its cover was a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro; above the drawing was printed The Black Plague. Its author was somebody with several academic degrees after his name. She opened the pamphlet, sat down in her father’s chair, and began reading. When she had finished, she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail, and walked into the kitchen. She held the pamphlet in front of her aunt. “What is this thing?” she said. Alexandra looked over her glasses at it. “Something of your father’s.” Jean Louise stepped on the garbage can trigger and threw the pamphlet in. “Don’t do that,” said Alexandra. “They’re hard to come by these days.” Jean Louise opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “Aunty, have you read that thing? Do you know what’s in it?” “Certainly.” If Alexandra had uttered an obscenity in her face, Jean Louise would have been less surprised. “You—Aunty, do you know the stuff in that thing makes Dr. Goebbels look like a naive little country boy?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jean Louise. There are a lot of truths in that book.” “Yes indeedy,” said Jean Louise wryly. “I especially liked the part where the Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn’t help being inferior to the white race because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower—whatever that means—so we must all be very kind to them and not let them do anything to hurt themselves and keep them in their places. Good God, Aunty—” Alexandra was ramrod straight. “Well?” she said. Jean Louise said, “It’s just that I never knew you went in for salacious reading material, Aunty.” Her aunt was silent, and Jean Louise continued: “I was real impressed with the parable where since the dawn of history the rulers of the world have always been white, except Genghis Khan or somebody—the author was real fair about that—and he made a killin’ point about even the Pharaohs were white and their subjects were either black or Jews—” “That’s true, isn’t it?” “Sure, but what’s that got to do with the case?” When Jean Louise felt apprehensive, expectant, or on edge, especially when confronting her aunt, her brain clicked to the meter of Gilbertian tomfoolery. Three sprightly figures
Harper Lee (Go Set a Watchman)
Yes,” her boss responded, “one for us and one for the customer.” “I’m sorry, so you are saying that the client is asking for a copy and we need a copy for internal use?” “Actually, I’ll check with the client—they haven’t asked for anything. But I definitely want a copy. That’s just how I do business.” “Absolutely,” she responded. “Thanks for checking with the customer. Where would you like to store the in-house copy? There’s no more space in the file room here.” “It’s fine. You can store it anywhere,” he said, slightly perturbed now. “Anywhere?” she mirrored again, with calm concern. When another person’s tone of voice or body language is inconsistent with his words, a good mirror can be particularly useful. In this case, it caused her boss to take a nice, long pause—something he did not often do. My student sat silent. “As a matter of fact, you can put them in my office,” he said, with more composure than he’d had the whole conversation. “I’ll get the new assistant to print it for me after the project is done. For now, just create two digital backups.” A day later her boss emailed and wrote simply, “The two digital backups will be fine.” Not long after, I received an ecstatic email from this student: “I was shocked! I love mirrors! A week of work avoided!” Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when you first try it. That’s the only hard part about it; the technique takes a little practice. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’ll become a conversational Swiss Army knife valuable in just about every professional and social setting.
Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Then one evening he reached the last chapter, and then the last page, the last verse. And there it was! That unforgivable and unfathomable misprint that had caused the owner of the books to order them to be pulped. Now Bosse handed a copy to each of them sitting round the table, and they thumbed through to the very last verse, and one by one burst out laughing. Bosse was happy enough to find the misprint. He had no interest in finding out how it got there. He had satisfied his curiosity, and in the process had read his first book since his schooldays, and even got a bit religious while he was at it. Not that Bosse allowed God to have any opinion about Bellringer Farm’s business enterprise, nor did he allow the Lord to be present when he filed his tax return, but – in other respects – Bosse now placed his life in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely none of them would worry about the fact that he set up his stall at markets on Saturdays and sold bibles with a tiny misprint in them? (‘Only ninety-nine crowns each! Jesus! What a bargain!’) But if Bosse had cared, and if, against all odds, he had managed to get to the bottom of it, then after what he had told his friends, he would have continued: A typesetter in a Rotterdam suburb had been through a personal crisis. Several years earlier, he had been recruited by Jehovah’s Witnesses but they had thrown him out when he discovered, and questioned rather too loudly, the fact that the congregation had predicted the return of Jesus on no less than fourteen occasions between 1799 and 1980 – and sensationally managed to get it wrong all fourteen times. Upon which, the typesetter had joined the Pentecostal Church; he liked their teachings about the Last Judgment, he could embrace the idea of God’s final victory over evil, the return of Jesus (without their actually naming a date) and how most of the people from the typesetter’s childhood including his own father, would burn in hell. But this new congregation sent him packing too. A whole month’s collections had gone astray while in the care of the typesetter. He had sworn by all that was holy that the disappearance had nothing to do with him. Besides, shouldn’t Christians forgive? And what choice did he have when his car broke down and he needed a new one to keep his job? As bitter as bile, the typesetter started the layout for that day’s jobs, which ironically happened to consist of printing two thousand bibles! And besides, it was an order from Sweden where as far as the typesetter knew, his father still lived after having abandoned his family when the typesetter was six years old. With tears in his eyes, the typesetter set the text of chapter upon chapter. When he came to the very last chapter – the Book of Revelation – he just lost it. How could Jesus ever want to come back to Earth? Here where Evil had once and for all conquered Good, so what was the point of anything? And the Bible… It was just a joke! So it came about that the typesetter with the shattered nerves made a little addition to the very last verse in the very last chapter in the Swedish bible that was just about to be printed. The typesetter didn’t remember much of his father’s tongue, but he could at least recall a nursery rhyme that was well suited in the context. Thus the bible’s last two verses plus the typesetter’s extra verse were printed as: 20. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.22. And they all lived happily ever after.
Jonas Jonasson (Der Hundertjährige, der aus dem Fenster stieg und verschwand)
When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?
Ryan Holiday (Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue)
The Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in 1913. Most people think that this bank is an American Federal Company. That is just as wrong as the conviction that the Bank of England belongs to the British Crown or to the whole of England. The Federal Reserve is in the hands of the Rothschilds and company. In his speech before the Senate, on December 15, 1987, Senator Jesse Helms said: “The principal instrument of the control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System.” The Federal Reserve has a monopoly over the expenditure of the dollar as a world currency and determining the interest rate, and it disposes of a lot more monopolies. How does the Federal Reserve Bank operate? Suppose the United States government needs a couple of billion dollars for its expenses that cannot be paid with taxes income. At that moment it addresses the Federal Reserve Board. Then government bonds for the needed billion dollars are printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. After these bonds are handed over to the bankers of the Federal Reserve, the board grants a loan to the government in the amount of the bond issue. The Federal Reserve draws interest from the government from the day the bonds are delivered. From that day on the government is allowed to draw checks against the Federal Reserve for the amount of the bonds. What are the consequences of this incredible transaction? The government simply saddles the people with a billion dollar debt to the Federal Reserve Bank, apart from the interest on interest that also has to be paid by “ordinary people”. What does the Federal Reserve have to say about “their” money? “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, deposits merely book entries.”[76] When the Federal Reserve needs new, or more, currency to transact its business, it takes the bonds over to the United States Treasury for safekeeping and asks the Treasury Department for the billions of dollars of new currency it needs. The Bank is accommodated on condition that it will pay the printing bill. It only pays for the expenditure costs of the banknotes, which are no more than a mere 500 dollars for ink and paper!
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?
Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.
Samantha Ellis
While I may be pessimistic about parts of the business that support journalism, I’m optimistic about the robust survival of journalism in the long run.
George Brock (Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age)
TERMS AND CONDITIONS Sketches and Comps Fee quoted includes ____ preliminary concepts / sketches; additional concepts / sketches are $ _______ each. Final Artwork Fee quoted includes one set of final mechanical artwork. Changes to final artwork will be provided at an additional cost based on the extent and complexity of the changes, at $ ___ per hour or a mutually agreed upon fee, TBD. Rights Upon full payment of all fees and costs, the following rights to the use of the designs and/or artwork transfer to Client, as noted: Credit Unless otherwise agreed, Designer shall be accorded a credit line on all published, printed material, to read as follows: Overtime Fees quoted are based upon work performed during the course of regular working hours (based on a ____ hour week). Overtime, rush, holiday, and weekend work necessitated by Client’s directive is billed in addition to the fees quoted at $ ____ per hour or a mutually agreed upon fee, TBD. Change Orders Work change orders will be issued for additional work and changes requested after approvals or commencement of work. WCO’s include a description of the change/addition requested, estimated additional costs, and changes to work schedules/project completion. Client’s signature is required on WCO’s to proceed with changes/additions. Billable Items In addition to the fees and costs estimated herein, costs incurred for outside services (TBD), messengers, and courier services are billable (at cost __; with a markup of __ percent). Wherever applicable, state and local sales taxes will be included in Billable Items. Travel expenses are billed additionally, at cost.
Eva Doman Bruck (Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers)
We would not accept a situation in which every home and business had to operate its own power plant, library, printing press and water reservoir. Why should we do so for computers?
Scientific American (A.I. and Genius Machines)
If you’re feeling down about the world, the book, “Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century,” is an antidote. Mr. Rogers and Mr. Heck outline how emerging advances — among them 3-D printing, autonomous vehicles, modular construction systems and home automation — might in time alter some of the world’s largest industries and bring prosperity to billions of people.
Anonymous
Cool Merchandise You Can Get from a Scary House Manufacturer Watching your employees working as team for your business is always a very satisfying feeling. If you are horror house owner, you can watch your employees working together and feel the same satisfaction. There is always a true relationship between employee and employer. Dress code plays a great role in binding your employees together and with your business as well. You can ask your scary house manufacturer to provide you some personalized merchandise that your employees will relish to have. Most of the horror house merchandises are personalized therefore you have option to design it of your own. To encourage your employees, you can seek their suggestion for designing of the logo, style or design for various merchandises. Merchandise You Can Get for Your Horror House There are few items which each of your employees will surely like and we are including only those merchandises in this list, Employee’s Identity cards – When you have setup a business, all your employee should look like working in a group and not like individuals. You can ask for employee’s identity card from your scary house manufacturer and hold your employee as a team. T-Shits with company logo – Design your company logo. If possible take inputs of employees in designing and creating logo. Print it on a plain t-shirt and it becomes a brand identity of your company. There are some other cool things that not only show the brand identity of scary house manufacturer but are very helpful for their horror house operations. These include Tyvek Tickets, Queue Manager, personalized display stands, etc. horrorhouse.in
Peter Capaldi
For various ideological reasons, the business world, the entertainment industry, and most users of the World Wide Web have shown little interest in a serious critique of digital media, but they are all eager to use digital technology to extend and remake forms of representation and communication.
Jay David Bolter (Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print)
Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
Amazon Kdp
Although there are many differences between America and post–World War I Germany, history has some economic lessons to teach us. Remember that after World War I, Germany was saddled with huge debts the nation chose to pay through the printing of money, and more money. Not everyone was hurt as a result of this strategy; businesses with huge debts paid them off with essentially worthless pieces of paper. The result, of course, was rapid inflation until the mark became worthless, and many people’s savings were wiped out. The resulting economic collapse paved the way for a strong leader who promised to end the madness, and thus Hitler rose to power.
Erwin W. Lutzer (Where Do We Go From Here?: Hope and Direction in our Present Crisis)
There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business.
Ed Viesturs (K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain)
All purchases made on client’s behalf will be billed to client. In all cases, such prices will reflect a markup of ___%. Charges for sales tax, insurance, storage, and shipping and handling are additional to the price of each purchase. In the event client purchases materials, services, or any items other than those specified by the designer, the designer is not liable for the cost, quality, workmanship, condition, or appearance of such items. Schedule of Payment Hourly Rate: Regular billing periods (bimonthly, monthly) based on hours consumed or periodic approval points. Fee Billing: ___ percent upon project commencement, ___ percent following completion of concept development, ___ percent upon completion of design development, ___ percent upon completion of production, ___ percent upon completion of implementation. Invoices are payable upon receipt. Termination Policy Client and Designer may terminate project based upon mutually agreeable terms to be determined in writing, either prior to signing of this proposal or within the final Client-Designer Contract. Term of Proposal The information contained in this proposal is valid for 30 days. Proposals approved and signed by the Client are binding upon the Designer and Client beginning on the date of Client’s signature. If the information in this Proposal meets with Client’s approval, Client’s signature below authorizes Designer to begin work. Kindly return a signed copy of this Proposal/Agreement to Designer’s office. Designer Signature _____________ Print Designer Name _____________ Date _____________ Client Signature _____________ Print Client Name _____________ Date _____________
Eva Doman Bruck (Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers)
In the end, it is your responsibility to read the small print, whether it is for gig contracts, record contracts, investors, management, booking agents, or anything else. You can blame everyone else for your mistakes, but when you make them, you end up being the one who has to pay.
Loren Weisman
An article in the New York Times concluded that, “Television will never be a serious competitor for radio.” If you’re listening to the radio, you can get on and do other things. To experience television, the Times argued, “People must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen.” Ironically, of course, this was to become the very attraction of the whole system. Nonetheless, it seemed clear to the writer that, “The average American family doesn’t have time for it.” Well, they found time. On average, the average American family went on to squeeze about 25 hours a week from their busy schedules to sit and keep their eyes glued on the television. The fault line in the Times’ assessment of television was to judge it in terms of contemporary cultural values where there seemed to be no place for it. In fact, television was not squeezed into existing American culture: it changed the culture forever. After the arrival of television, the world was never the same place again. Television proved to be a transformative technology, just as print, the steam engine, electricity, the motorcar and others before it had been.
Anonymous
Besides, there are other concerns. Suppose this—What did you call him?” “Falconer.” “Suppose this Falconer sells the play to a printer, who publishes it and has it registered. Then the Chamberlain’s Men lose all legal right to perform it ourselves.” “Oh. I didn’t ken.” “We generally delay publication as long as possible. Some companies care little for registrations or rights, and to print the play is the same as saying ‘Here it is, and welcome to it.’ Yet if we don’t publish it ourselves, someone will sell a pirated version. It’s a tricky and an unfair business.” “Aye, I see that now.” I felt more ashamed than ever of the part I’d played in the whole affair. I wanted to believe that we still might retrieve the play book, but knowing Falconer, I did not hold out much hope. Even if we did catch up with him, he was not likely to just apologize and hand it over. By the time we reached St. Paul’s and turned on to Aldersgate Street, I was sweating and trembling as if in the grip of the ague. But with the gate in sight, I managed to push myself yet a little farther. A ragged, legless beggar sat by the gate. Mr. Armin crouched and dropped a
Gary L. Blackwood (The Shakespeare Stealer (Shakespeare Stealer, #1))
Most neoclassical economists would argue that state-owned firms will inevitably be less efficient than private ones because the state lacks the proper incentives to run enterprises efficiently. The state does not have to fear bankruptcy, since it can keep businesses going out of tax dollars or, at worst, by printing money. It also has strong incentives to use the firm for political ends like job creation and patronage. These deficiencies of public ownership have been the underlying justification for the global move toward privatization over the past decade. But state-owned enterprises can be run more or less efficiently, and any final judgment as to the efficiency price paid for nationalization has to be measured against the entrepreneurial capabilities of that society’s private sector. In France, nationalized companies have often been allowed considerable managerial discretion and operate not much differently from their private sector counterparts.36
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)