Produce Sales Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Produce Sales. Here they are! All 100 of them:

In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.
Daniel H. Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others)
In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.
Karl Marx (Das Kapital)
1. Society needs laws. While anarchy can often turn a humdrum weekend into something unforgettable, eventually the mob must be kept from stealing the conch and killing Piggy. And while it would be nice if that "something" was simple human decency, anybody who has witnessed the "50% Off Wedding Dress Sale" at Filene's Basement knows we need a backup plan—preferably in writing. On the other hand, too many laws can result in outright tyranny, particularly if one of those laws is "Kneel before Zod." Somewhere between these two extremes lies the legislative sweet-spot that produces just the right amount of laws for a well-adjusted society—more than zero, less than fascism.
Jon Stewart (America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction)
money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard‐earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If low price is the only basis of competition with rival products, similarly produced, there ensues a cut-throat competition which can end only by taking all the profit and incentive out of the industry. The logical way out of this dilemma is for the manufacturer to develop some sales appeal other than mere cheapness, to give the product, in the public mind, some other attraction, some idea that will modify the product slightly, some element of originality that will distinguish it from products in the same line. Thus,
Edward L. Bernays (Propaganda)
It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” “Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?” said Richard Frost. “Oh, it isn’t a matter of hunger. It’s something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous—but not quite. Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys….
John Steinbeck (Cannery Row (Cannery Row, #1))
Apple Stores produce more sales per square foot than any other retailer in the United States, including luxury stores like Tiffany.
Neel Doshi (Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation)
I want to mass produce wretchedness. An unsatisfactory factory. Then I want to produce cologne and stench—at different ends of the production line. So it would be an olfactory factory.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
I wonder how Japan's futuristic robot doctors will treat the worst and most widespread disease humanity already has - artificially lowered IQ. Making people stupider makes them buy more stuff – so “How many robots can you afford?” will be the big question of one of the following decades, unless we go back to Communism and produce everything for the sake of it, for free.
Will Advise (Nothing is here...)
If you were to ask me what kind of musical sound I aspire to produce, that noise would be a wet nipple sliding across a cheese grater. I’m a sucker for love songs.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Salespeople on commission, for example, are seldom sensitive to the costs of the sales they produce.
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered “prime stock” to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.
Dorothy Roberts (Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Vintage))
Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.
David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)
In this day and age, entrepreneurial and sales strategies are key to producing creative, original, digital content and marketing in line with current social and media trends.
Germany Kent
advertising produces familiarity which produces sales
Paul Cookson
I don't like the term Stock Keeping Unit because it Implies that the priority is to keep products in stock. But keeping things in stock is inefficient and therefore should not be the priority. The ideal is for there to be minimal gap between production and sale; minimal gap between the time of production and time of consumption. The ideal is for things to be produced as needed, not to be stocked until needed.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard‐earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
a judge in Vermont ruled in favor of a runaway slave whose master had produced a bill of sale proving his ownership: the judge said in order to retain his property in the form of another man he’d have to provide a bill of sale from “God Almighty.” 17
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
Ralph Lauren generates a huge portion of its sales from seconds and job lots sold at the many Polo factory stores around the country. There are so many of these stores (and the demand is so high) that many of the items sold aren’t seconds at all. They’re designed and produced for the factory stores. People tell themselves a story about finding a bargain, they build up the expectation by driving thirty miles out of their way (while on vacation, no less) and then are delighted to spend $40 for a $400 jacket that was never intended to be sold for $400 and probably cost $4 to make.
Seth Godin (All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All)
The Yap Island chiefs who refused O'Keefe's cheap Rai stones understood what most modern economists fail to grasp: a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina states that of the six hundred thousand food items for sale in the United States, 80 percent are laced with added sugar. Ninety percent of the food produced in the United States is sold to you by a total of ten conglomerates—Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dole, General Mills, Hormel, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever.
Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease)
Asked whether they would rather eat an organic or a commercially grown apple, most people prefer the “all natural” one. Even after being informed that the two apples taste the same, have identical nutritional value, and are equally healthful, a majority still prefer the organic fruit. Even the producers of beer have found that they can increase sales by putting “All Natural” or “No Preservatives” on the label.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
If, as is the tendency today, the governing class defines job-creation as its main aim, where will this transformation of all activities into paid activities (with remuneration as their sole rationale and maximum productivity as their goal) finally end? How long will the extremely fragile barriers which still prevent the professionalization of motherhood and fatherhood be able to hold out? When shall we see the commercial procreation of embryos, the sale of children, or a trade in organs? Are we not already monetizing, professionalizing and selling not only those things and services we produce, but also what we are and what we cannot produce at will or detach from ourselves? In other words, are we not already transforming ourselves into commodities and treating life as one means among others rather than the supreme end which all means must subserve?
André Gorz (Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology)
requires the permission of Crossway. When quotations from the ESV text are used in non-saleable print and digital media, such as church bulletins, orders of service, posters, transparencies, or similar media, a complete copyright notice is not required, but the initials (ESV) must appear at the end of the quotation. Publication of any commentary or other Bible reference work produced for commercial sale that uses the English Standard
Anonymous (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (without Cross-References))
The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, however, was not complete. It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men—the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious transactions in the city’s history. (They didn’t have elevators yet. That’s why the scenes look so flat to Lila Mae: the city is dimensionless.) The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece—the colonists pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. (Someone knocks at the door of her room in 117 Second Avenue, but she doesn’t open her eyes.) Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please.
Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist)
The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.
Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
Oil extraction is much more capital-intensive than it is labor-intensive—which means it doesn’t produce a lot of lasting jobs. But in the end, it does produce big revenues when it’s sold on the global market. That sets the stage for grand-scale corruption of the political class: people who can maneuver themselves into getting a cut of that sale price of oil will find themselves quickly rich, whether or not they actually expend any effort to pump the stuff out of the ground.
Rachel Maddow (Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth)
He borrowed $28,000 and founded a software company that produced an online city guide for the newspaper publishing industry. He sold it to Compaq for $341 million four years later. He netted $22 million from that sale and immediately plowed the profits into a new company called X.com, which would evolve into PayPal. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, from which Musk received $165 million. Flush with cash, he harnessed these funds to fulfill his dreams, creating SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac 'n' cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named--- no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain.
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
Paper money in time of war, the new notes will first go into the pockets of the war contractors. 'As a result, these persons' demands for certain articles will increase and so also the price and the sale of these articles, but especially in so far as they are luxury articles. Thus the position of the producers of these articles will be improved, their demand for other commodities will also increase, and thus the increase of prices and sales will go on, distributing itself over a constantly augmented number of articles, until at last it has reached them all.
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point. And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.
Nancy Jo Sales (American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers)
Publishing a book, Watching its ways Force me to look At a screen for days "Be still, be still", My heart screams for life But I must check its sales, It's reviews, its likes. Another Instagram poet Who's dying And doesn't know it, Untying an underlying Knot of desire To be liked and admired For people to love what transpires From my mind, but I'm tired Of the social machine Producing my insecurity Hoping someone will follow me And like all my poetry From this point forth, find me nowhere, Socially unseen, Just on the back porch, without a care And without a screen
Eric Overby (Senses)
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The lessons of market history are clear. Styles and fashions in investors’ evaluations of securities can and often do play a critical role in the pricing of securities. The stock market at times conforms well to the castle-in-the-air theory. For this reason, the game of investing can be extremely dangerous. Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose. Investors would be well advised to treat new issues with a healthy dose of skepticism. Certainly investors in the past have built many castles in the air with IPOs. Remember that the major sellers of the stock of IPOs are the managers of the companies themselves. They try to time their sales to coincide with a peak in the prosperity of their companies or with the height of investor enthusiasm for some current fad. In such cases, the urge to get on the bandwagon—even in high-growth industries—produced a profitless prosperity for investors.
Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.
Ursula K. Le Guin
In 1967 Kilby and his team produced almost what Haggerty envisioned. It could do only four tasks (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) and was a bit heavy (more than two pounds) and not very cheap ($150).21 But it was a huge success. A new market had been created for a device people had not known they needed. And following the inevitable trajectory, it kept getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
The fear 1832 brought a great change in the fortunes of the Barrett family, and may be said to mark the end of the purely formative period in Elizabeth Barrett’s life. Hitherto she had been living in the home and among the surroundings of her childhood, absorbing literature rather than producing it; or if producing it, still mainly for her own amusement and instruction, rather than with any view of appealing to the general public. But in 1832 this home was broken up by the sale, of Hope End, and with the removal thence we seem to find her embarking definitely on literature as the avowed pursuit and occupation of her life. Sidmouth in Devonshire was the place to which the Barrett family now removed, and the letters begin henceforth to be longer and more frequent, and to tell a more connected tale.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The way I help twentysomethings gain confidence is by sending them back to work or back to their relationships with some better information. I teach them about how they can have more mastery over their emotions. I talk to them about what confidence really is. Literally, confidence means “with trust.” In research psychology, the more precise term is self-efficacy, or one’s ability to be effective or produce the desired result. No matter what word you use, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking, sales, teaching, or being an assistant—and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before. As was the case for every other twentysomething I’d worked with, Danielle’s confidence on the job could only come from doing well on the job—but not all the time.
Meg Jay (The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now)
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation. Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption. At
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
Credit must be given where credit is due. European culture’s politicoeconomic system is wholly at fault for the importation of weapons into our communities. We neither own nor operate any of the 922 gun manufacturers who, in this society alone, produce over 1.5 million legal handguns for sale each year. We had nothing to do with the 250 million handguns already legally in circulation. No, they do not force our youth to buy guns. But their cultural imperative of violence has created and socializes them into an atmosphere where fear begets violence and violence begets more fear and more violence, and the methods and tools for quelling those confrontations become an increasingly more destructive interpersonal arms race. Europeans know that the death of a young Afrikan male is not simply his death. It is also the murder of every coming, exponentially growing generation of Afrikans he was placed here to begin the procreation of. There
Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti (Homosexuality and the Effeminization of Afrikan Males)
word-of-mouth advertising. This is the Information Age, for Pete’s sake, so provide as much as you can. This can get more interesting if your product or ser vice is more interesting, but every product or ser vice can create a community—even bottled water or shaving cream. And I could go on with a chapter of ideas to expand on the concept, but you’ll do it yourself as you start down the path. Just think of your Web site as a community. Focus on it, not on you, and look to get involved with and serve that community at every turn. A good consumer example of a Web site that builds community is Stonyfield Farms, producer of organic dairy products (yogurt, milk, etc.). Their Web site offers terrific information on organic foods and how to help protect the Earth. They also provide recipes and a multitude of other information on wellness. One thing they could do to improve their community is to prominently promote a subscriber program. As of this writing, they
Chet Holmes (The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies)
Since the institution of slavery was so important to the economic development of America, it had a profound impact in shaping the social-political-legal structure of the nation. Land and slaves were the chief forms of private property, property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and determined politics. In the service of this system, human beings were reduced to propertyless property. Black men, the creators of the wealth of the New World, were stripped of all human and civil rights. And this degradation was sanctioned and protected by institutions of government, all for one purpose: to produce commodities for sale at a profit, which in turn would be privately appropriated. It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable was morally justifiable. The attempt to give moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
breast hair growth hips bums enlargement yodi pills and botsho creams for sale in UK, USA, Canada, UAE, call/whatsup +27737105667 For those hoping to grow their hair longer, faster, biotin has served as a vitamin supplement used in the quest for maximized hair growth. Biotin is a B-complex vitamin that can be found in both supplement and food form. Biotin deficiencies are associated with hair loss. Biotin is vital to cell proliferation, which is why it is a valuable tool in hair growth. When ingested, biotin reacts with cell enzymes and plays a vital part in producing amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. Hair itself consists of keratin, which is a form of protein. Therefore, consuming foods that contain biotin helps to contribute to hair growth. However, many people are missing one or even all of these lifestyle factors that make hair grow at its best rate. Because biotin helps hair reach its full potential in terms of growth, taking a supplement to meet the daily recommended dosage helps a person maximize her hair's fastest growth potential. for more information please N.B email orders and consultation are accepted make an order now by calling call/whatsup +27737105667
breast hips bums enlargement pills and cream
The explosion of government and spending under Obama insured that while the rest of the nation continued to suffer stagnant job growth and slow housing sales long past the time when a recovery should have been underway, one city was booming like a five-year-long Led Zeppelin drum solo: Washington, D.C. According to the 2014 Forbes ranking of the ten richest counties in America, none were in New York, California, or Texas. Before Obama took office, five of the richest counties surrounded Washington, D.C. Now, seven years after Obama took office on his promise to rid the place of big money lobbyists, and Democrats assumed complete control of the White House and Congress for two years, six of the richest counties surround Washington, D.C. Bear in mind that unlike Texas or California, where money is generated by creating products people actually need, such as oil or computers, Washington, D.C., produces nothing but government. In other words, six of the ten richest counties in America got that rich by being parasites. A case could be made that under the current leadership, crony capitalism is more rewarding than actual capitalism. And with all that government around business people’s necks, it’s certainly a heckuva lot easier.
Mike Huckabee (God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: and the Dad-Gummed Gummint That Wants to Take Them Away)
With regard to the price then of the men themselves, it is obvious that the public treasury is in a better position to provide funds than any private individuals. What can be easier than for the Council to invite by public proclamation all whom it may concern to bring their slaves, and to buy up those produced? Assuming the purchase to be effected, is it credible that people will hesitate to hire from the state rather than from the private owner, and actually on the same terms? People have at all events no hesitation at present in hiring consecrated grounds, sacred victims, houses, etc., or in purchasing the right of farming taxes from the state. To ensure the preservation of the purchased property, the treasury can take the same securities precisely from the lessee as it does from those who purchase the right of farming its taxes. Indeed, fraudulent dealing is easier on the part of the man who has purchased such a right than of the man who hires slaves. Since it is not easy to see how the exportation of public money is to be detected, when it differs in no way from private money. Whereas it will take a clever thief to make off with these slaves, marked as they will be with the public stamp, and in face of a heavy penalty attached at once to the sale and exportation of them. Up to this point then it would appear feasible enough for the state to acquire property in men and to keep a safe watch over them.
Xenophon (On Revenues)
Jean Granier a remarcat ca Nietzsche opune darwinismului doua observatii: 1) formele inferioare sunt incapabile de a produce forme superioare; 2) cei mediocri si slabi castiga in general the stuggle for life. Sa investigam pentru inceput a doua observatie. «La fel ca la toate celelalte specii animale, si in cazul omului exista un surplus de ratati, bolnavi, degenerati, infirmi, insi haraziti suferintei; si printre oameni reusitele constituie intotdeauna exceptia, si chiar o exceptie rara. Cu cat tipul uman care il reprezinta pe un om este de un grad mai inalt cu atat mai mare este imposibilitatea reusitei sale. Religiile [...] apar printre cauzele principale care au contribuit la mentinerea tipului om pe o treapta inferioara de dezvoltare - ele au conservat prea multi dintre acei care trebuiau sa piara». Cei mediocri si cei slabi sunt mai angrenati, mai implicati in viata, pentru ca sunt mai aproape de imediatul biologic. Spiritualizarea si subtilizarea excesiva duc la un dezacord frapant intre viata si intelect, pe de o parte, si intre exceptie si norma pe de alta. Norma si imediatul biologic dicteaza. Astfel, cei slabi («cei dezavantajati») castiga, fiind inserati intr-un context pe care nu vor sa-l schimbe si care il accepta, fara eforturi. Pe cand omul exceptional este imediat deconspirat drept un organism cancerigen si evacuat cat mai este vreme, pentru ca inteligenta sa actioneaza ca o mutatie. Din punct de vedere socio-psihologic, Nietzsche are dreptate: cei inteligenti esueaza datorita lipsei de motivatie; ei sunt incadrati intr-o schema, a carei banalitate si lipsa de profunzime ii plictiseste.
Ştefan Bolea (Introducere in nihilismul nietzschean)
Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way. It is not uncommon for twentysomething clients to come to therapy hoping I can help them increase their confidence. Some wonder if maybe I do hypnosis and a hypnotherapy session might do the trick (I don’t, and it wouldn’t), or they hope I can recommend some herbal remedy (I can’t). The way I help twentysomethings gain confidence is by sending them back to work or back to their relationships with some better information. I teach them about how they can have more mastery over their emotions. I talk to them about what confidence really is. Literally, confidence means “with trust.” In research psychology, the more precise term is self-efficacy, or one’s ability to be effective or produce the desired result. No matter what word you use, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking, sales, teaching, or being an assistant—and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before. As was the case for every other twentysomething I’d worked with, Danielle’s confidence on the job could only come from doing well on the job—but not all the time.
Meg Jay (The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now)
Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.
Harvard Business School Press (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
The successful individual sales producer wins by being as selfish as possible with her time. The more often the salesperson stays away from team members and distractions, puts her phone on Do Not Disturb (DND), closes her door, or chooses to work for a few hours from the local Panera Bread café, the more productive she’ll likely be. In general, top producers in sales tend to exhibit a characteristic I’ve come to describe as being selfishly productive. The seller who best blocks out the rest of the world, who maintains obsessive control of her calendar, who masters focusing solely on her own highest-value revenue-producing activities, who isn’t known for being a “team player,” and who is not interested in playing good corporate citizen or helping everyone around her, is typically a highly effective seller who ends up on top of the sales rankings. Contrary to popular opinion, being selfish is not bad at all. In fact, for an individual contributor salesperson, it is a highly desirable trait and a survival skill, particularly in today’s crazed corporate environment where everyone is looking to put meetings on your calendar and take you away from your primary responsibilities! Now let’s switch gears and look at the sales manager’s role and responsibilities. How well would it work to have a sales manager who kept her office phone on DND and declined almost every incoming call to her mobile phone? Do we want a sales manager who closes her office door, is concerned only about herself, and is for the most part inaccessible? No, of course not. The successful sales manager doesn’t win on her own; she wins through her people by helping them succeed. Think about other key sales management responsibilities: Leading team meetings. Developing talent. Encouraging hearts. Removing obstacles. Coaching others. Challenging data, false assumptions, wrong attitudes, and complacency. Pushing for more. Putting the needs of your team members ahead of your own. Hmmm. Just reading that list again reminds me why it is often so difficult to transition from being a top producer in sales into a sales management role. Aside from the word sales, there is truly almost nothing similar about the positions. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on corporate responsibilities like participating on the executive committee, dealing with human resources compliance issues, expense management, recruiting, and all the other burdens placed on the sales manager. Again,
Mike Weinberg (Sales Management. Simplified.: The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team)
The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA)
PLOŞNIŢE: Dintre toate formele de sexualitate animală, cea a ploşniţelor de pat (Cimex lectularius) este cea mai stupefiantă. Nici o închipuire omenească nu poate egala o asemenea perversiune. Prima particularitate: priapismul. Ploşniţa de pat nu se opreşte niciodată din copulaţie. Unii indivizi au peste două sute de raporturi sexuale pe zi. A doua particularitate: homosexualitatea şi bestialitatea. Ploşniţele de pat întâmpină dificultăţi în deosebirea semenilor şi, dintre aceşti semeni, le este şi mai greu să recunoască femelele. 50% din raporturile lor sunt homosexuale, 20% se produc cu alte specii, iar 30% se efectuează cu femele. A treia particularitate: penisul perforant. Ploşniţele de pat sunt echipate cu un sex lung dotat cu un vârf ascuţit. Prin intermediul acestui instrument asemănător cu o seringă, masculii străpung carapacea şi îşi injectează sămânţa oriunde, la întâmplare ― în cap, în abdomen, în labe, în spinare, ba chiar şi în inima doamnei lor! Operaţia nu afectează cu nimic sănătatea femelei, dar cum ar mai putea ele să rămână însărcinate în asemenea condiţii? De unde şi... ... A patra particularitate: virgina însărcinată. Din exterior, vaginul ei pare intact şi, totuşi, ea a primit o lovitură de penis în spinare. Cum pot supravieţui spermatozoizii în sânge? De fapt, majoritatea vor fi distruşi de sistemul imunitar, ca nişte vulgari microbi străini. Pentru a multiplica şansele ca vreo sută dintre aceşti gameţi masculi să ajungă la destinaţie, cantitatea de spermă eliberată e fenomenală. Cu titlu de comparaţie, dacă masculii ploşniţe ar avea dimensiunile unei fiinţe omeneşti, ei ar elibera treizeci de litri de spermă la fiecare ejaculare. Din această mulţime de spermatozoizi va supravieţui un număr extrem de mic. Ascunşi în ungherele arterelor, pitiţi prin vene, ei îşi vor aştepta sorocul. Femela îşi petrece iarna găzduindu-i pe aceşti locatari clandestini. Primăvara, conduşi de instinct, toţi spermatozoizii din cap, labe şi abdomen se strâng în jurul ovarelor, le străpung şi pătrund în interiorul lor. Fazele următoare ale ciclului se vor desfăşura fără nici o problemă. A cincea particularitate: femela cu sexe multiple. Fiind tot timpul perforate pretutindeni de sexele masculilor, femelele ploşniţe ajung la un moment dat să fie acoperite de cicatrice care conturează fante maronii înconjurate de o zonă deschisă la culoare. Asemenea unor ţinte! În felul acesta se poate şti câte acuplări a avut femela. Natura a încurajat aceste nelegiuiri dând naştere unor adaptări ciudate. Generaţie după generaţie, anumite mutaţii au ajuns să creeze incredibilul însuşi. Ploşniţele de sex feminin au ajuns să se nască având pe spate pete maronii, aureolate de o culoare deschisă. Fiecărei pete îi corespunde un receptacul care este un "sex sucursală" legat direct de sexul principal. Particularitatea aceasta există actualmente în toate fazele dezvoltării sale: lipsa cicatricelor, câteva cicatrice receptacule la naştere, veritabile vagine secundare pe spinare. A şasea particularitate: autoîncornorarea. Ce se întâmplă atunci când un mascul este perforat de un alt mascul? Sperma supravieţuieşte şi înaintează ca de obicei spre regiunea ovarelor. Negăsindu-le, se îndreaptă spre canalele deferente ale gazdei şi se amestecă cu spermatozoizii autohtoni. Rezultatul: când masculul pasiv va perfora, la rândul sau, o femelă, el îi va injecta propriii spermatozoizi, dar şi pe cei ai masculului cu care a întreţinut raporturi sexuale. A şaptea particularitate: hermafroditismul. Natura nu conteneşte să facă experienţe ciudate pe cobaiul său sexual favorit şi masculii ploşniţe au suferit, la rândul lor, mutaţii: în Africa trăieşte ploşniţa Afrocimex constrictus, ai cărei masculi se nasc cu nişte mici vagine secundare pe spinare. Aceştia nu sunt, totuşi, fecunzi. Se pare că aceste vagine au un rol pur decorativ sau de încurajare a raporturilor homosexuale.
Bernard Werber (Le Jour des fourmis (La Saga des Fourmis, #2))
So what? This produces a onetime cash windfall from inventory reduction and speeds return on investment, but is it really a revolutionary achievement? In fact, it is because the ability to design, schedule, and make exactly what the customer wants just when the customer wants it means you can throw away the sales forecast and simply make what customers actually tell you they need.
James P. Womack (Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation)
I contend that proposing too early in the sales process (aka Premature Proposal Syndrome) produces a less-than-ideal proposal and puts the seller at a disadvantage. Some of the possible dangers of prematurely delivering a proposal include not having identified the buyer’s criteria for making a decision, all the key players involved in the decision, and the true underlying issues driving the request for a proposal.
Mike Weinberg (New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development)
I produce produce. I’m a farmer of redundancy.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Denmark: Fatal Outbreak Tied to Meat By REUTERS An outbreak of listeria tied to contaminated Danish meat has killed 12 people since last September, with most of the deaths in the past three months, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries said Tuesday. The outbreak was finally traced on Monday to a popular type of cold cut called rullepolse — “rolled sausage” in Danish, typically made of pork stuffed with herbs and spices — produced by a company near Copenhagen, Jorn A. Rullepolser A/S. “This is completely incomprehensible for us,” Christina Lowies Jensen, an official at the company, told TV2 television, saying all production and sales had been halted. Listeria can lead to fatal infections, especially in the young or the elderly.
Anonymous
On the sale of Essence Communications Inc: "What I would first learn is something that Suzanne de Passe, the legendary Hollywood producer who headed Motown Productions, commented on thirty years ago when there was talk of Motown being sold: 'In a certain way black people seem to feel that black companies owe them something extra, the kind of something extra that cannot be given if you want to stay in business.
Edward Lewis (The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women)
When I find a pair of pants I like, I buy a lot of them. Really a lot. Perhaps there’s something genetic here; I collect pants like my Uncle Morris collected meat. I do this because pants wear out. Is this part of a plot by the clothing manufacturers to keep us buying more? Some people think so. In my Sound and Fury file, I find an old (September 20, 1982) Ann Landers column about pantyhose manufacturers who deliberately create products that self-destruct after a week instead of a year because “the no-run nylons, which they know how to make, would put a serious crimp in their sales.” Ann concludes that she and her readers are “at the mercy of a conspiracy of self-interest.” One wonders whose self-interest Ann has in mind. Surely it’s not the manufacturers’. If there were a cost-justified way to do it, any self-interested manufacturer would switch from selling one-week nylons at $1 to selling one-year nylons at $52. That pleases the customers (whose pantyhose budget doesn’t change but who make fewer trips to the store), maintains the manufacturer’s revenue, and—because he produces about 98 percent fewer nylons—cuts his costs considerably.
Steven E. Landsburg (The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life)
Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.
Steve Hindy (The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Band of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World's Favorite Drink)
As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...] The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint.
Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of the population of India lived in its villages. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed r i g h t s t o a s h a r e o f t h e p r o d u c e . T h i s c r e a t e d r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f c o o p e r a t i o n , c o m p e t i t i o n a n d conflict among them. The sum of these agrarian relationships made up rural society. At the same time agencies from outside also entered into the rural world. Most important among these was the Mughal state, which der ived the bulk of its income from agricultural production. Agents of the state – revenue assessors, collectors, record keepers – sought to control rural society so as to ensure that cultivation took place and the s t a t e g o t i t s r e g u l a r s h a r e o f t a x e s f r o m t h e produce. Since many crops were grown for sale, trade, money and markets entered the villages and linked the agricultural areas with the towns.
Anonymous
Capitalism is not the mere existence of persons or firms producing for sale on the market with the intention of obtaining a profit. Such persons or firms have existed for thousands of years all across the world. Nor is the existence of persons working for wages sufficient as a definition. Wage-labor has also been known for thousands of years. We are in a capitalist system only when the system gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital. Using such a definition, only the modern world-system has been a capitalist system. Endless accumulation is a quite simple concept: it means that people and firms are accumulating capital in order to accumulate still more capital, a process that is continual and endless. If we say that a system “gives priority” to such endless accumulation, it means that there exist structural mechanisms by which those who act with other motivations are penalized in some way, and are eventually eliminated from the social scene, whereas those who act with the appropriate motivations are rewarded and, if successful, enriched.
Anonymous
Here are eight tips for writing effective cover letters.   Address the cover letter to a specific person, ensuring the correct name, title, company, and address. This shows respect for the person you are sending the résumé to. “To Whom It May Concern” salutations should be used only if you can’t determine the name of the hiring person or the company (for instance, when responding to a blind ad). If you were referred by someone, be sure this is included in the first sentence of the cover letter: “Jennifer Wells suggested I contact you in regard to an accounts receivable position you have open …” It’s an attention grabber. If asked to include salary history or requirements, you must address this or risk being disqualified. Provide a healthy range, such as “Over the past five years I have earned between $35,000 and $48,000. However, I am open to any reasonable offer consistent with my ability to produce results and meet your performance expectations.” If asked for salary requirements, use the same strategy: “I am aware that the salary range for a loss prevention manager in the Houston area averages between $75,000 and $110,000. Given my experience and, most importantly, my ability to make significant contributions to your company, I would hope to be on the upper end of this scale.” If you are sending the résumé out electronically, the cover letter can be inserted as the e-mail itself; just attach your résumé. If you prefer that your cover letter is the first page of the attachment, that’s fine. But the general guideline is not to attach multiple files. Make it easy on the hiring manager and send only one attachment or file to open (unless you have a good reason to do otherwise). Do not rehash what is on the résumé. This is disrespectful of the reader’s time. If you have done a good job with your résumé, you want the cover letter to quickly entice the hiring manager to read your résumé. Cover letters should not be preachy. Sales managers know that sales are the heartbeat of any company; you don’t have to lecture them on this. Nurse supervisors know the importance of compassionate patient care; you don’t have to tell them what they already know. Keep the letter short and concise. The cover letter is not the place to preach or teach. It’s the place to invite recipients to read your résumé! Finally, the four most important words on the cover letter are “I respect your time.” The following cover letter is a sample template to use in these challenging and troubled times. Notice the first four words of the second paragraph.
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
Central Excise 2.3 Central Excise Duty is levied by the Central Government under the Central Excise Act, 1944. The levy is on all goods manufactured and produced in India, which are specified in the schedule to the Central Excise Tariff Act subject to certain exemptions. The effective rate may vary from product to product though most goods are subject to excise duty at 10% (without education cess). As manufacturer, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a setoff against the excise duty payable on the output. Cross credit utilisation between credit of service tax and excise duty has been enabled w.e.f.10.9.2004. Service tax 2.4 Service tax is levied by the Central Government under Chapter V and Chapter VA of Finance Act, 1994. Service tax is levied on specified services, referred to as taxable services, when rendered by a service provider. Service tax is presently taxed at 10% (without education cess).Ordinarily, service tax is payable by the service provider, except in specified cases. As service provider, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a set-off against the service tax payable on taxable services. VAT & CST 2.5 Value Added Tax (VAT) is levied by the State Governments on transfer of property in goods from one person to another, when such transfer is for cash, deferred payment or other valuable consideration. VAT is also payable on certain transactions that are deemed to be sale such as transfer of right to use goods, hire purchase and sale by instalments, works contract and sale of food and drink as a part of rendering of any service. 2.6 Local VAT is payable when goods are sold within the State and Central Sales Tax (CST) is payable when sale occasions the movement of goods 4
Anonymous
Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here. Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function What is important? Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as). The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet. The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here. With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?" In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders? Aviation. Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon. Delivery. John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.
PointHero
1. You might want to perform an audit of the paperwork your sales team is required to fill out to determine whether it is actually needed to produce sales. If it does not directly contribute to sales, get rid of it. If the paperwork is providing the company with necessary information, analyze how you can go about obtaining that information without burdening the sales team. By removing that burden from the sales team, could you see a pickup in selling time that will translate to an increase in sales?   2. Have you had to reduce territories, products, or rep income? What was the effect on your team?   3. Do you allow your team members the right to fail? What constitutes too much failure for an individual, and where do you draw the line? How do you communicate your policy to maintain a consistent message that is seen as fair and reasonable by your sales team?
John R. Treace (Nuts and Bolts of Sales Management: How to Build a High-Velocity Sales Organization)
I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.
Bernadette Jiwa (The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One)
Belly went against the trend of flash sales to create a more sustainable business model for their small business customer. They developed an affordable subscription-based product that helped these merchants cultivate longer, more meaningful, and more profitable relationships with existing customers—turning them into loyal shoppers who produce a sustainable and more valuable customer base.
Sean Ellis (Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth)
if information goods are to be distributed at their marginal cost of production—zero—they cannot be created and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales to consumers to cover their [fixed set-up] costs. If
Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism)
Vioxx was believed to have caused more than sixty thousand deaths. Merck, the producer of the drug, is the second largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., and profited tremendously from Vioxx, which earned $2.5 billion in sales in 2003 alone. When the drug was pulled due in large part to evidence that it contributed to fatal heart attacks and strokes, analysts anticipated that the judgment against Merck could run up to $25 billion. Yet the plea bargain reached in 2012 resulted in a fine of only $321 million, a mere blip on Merck’s bottom line.
Jim Marrs (Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us)
In the case of Obamacare, leading members of the intellectual class produced the appropriately rigged studies to promote the racket. Then members of the Obama administration and liberal Democrats in Congress took up these studies as an irrefutable demonstration of the wonders of Obamacare. Finally anchorpeople and reporters lined up to amplify the falsehoods and complete the sale to the American people. Despite all this, the American people remained unconvinced. Even so, the con men generated enough support that Democratic legislators, on a straight-party vote, got Obamacare through.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
you will quickly discover that soft skills do produce hard sales results. My
Colleen Stanley (Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success: Connect with Customers and Get Results)
What Vann-Adibe had discobered was that the aggregate market for niche music was huge, and effectively unbounded. He called this the '98 Percent Rule.' As he later put it to me, "In a wordl of almost zero packaging costs and instant access to almost all ocntent in this format, consumers exhibit consistent behavior: They look at almost everything. I believe that this requires major changes by the content producers - I'm just not sure what changes!"... Everywhere I went the story was the same: Hits are great, but niches are emerging as the big new market. The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal. Apple said that every one of the then 1 million tracks on iTues had sold at least once (now its inventory is twice that). Netflix reckoned that 95% of its 25,000 DVDs (that's now 90,000) rented at least once a quarter. Amazon didn't give out an exact number, but independent academic research on its book sales suggested that 98 percent of its top 100,00 books sold at least once a quarter, too.
Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More)
Few of us realize that we shoppers are mice in a complex retail maze. Supermarkets spend a vast amount of money to figure out how shoppers behave. Every detail is purposeful, from the music they play to the size of the font declaring sales. For instance, you probably notice that it's chilly in a supermarket. I used to think that was because the chill helped to preserve the food. In fact, cold triggers hunger. If you are hungry, you'll buy more. The first thing that you run into in a supermarket is the produce section. The tactile experience of touching food and the bright colors get you in the mood for shopping. The milk, flour and cereal are invariably spaced far apart. Why? Supermarkets are designed to slow you down. The longer you spend in the maze of a store trying to find staples, the more likely you'll buy something on impulse. Food manufacturers pay for premium shelf placement at eye level, or, in the cereal aisle, at the eye level of children.
Kathleen Flinn (The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks)
The familiar if sad tale of Apple Computer illustrates this crucial concept. Apple has suffered of late because positive feedback has fueled the competing system offered by Microsoft and Intel. As Wintel’s share of the personal computer market grew, users found the Wintel system more and more attractive. Success begat more success, which is the essence of positive feedback. With Apple’s share continuing to decline, many computer users now worry that the Apple Macintosh will shortly become the Sony Beta of computers, orphaned and doomed to a slow death as support from software producers gradually fades away. This worry is cutting into Apple’s sales, making it a potentially self-fulfilling forecast. Failure breeds failure: this, too, is the essence of positive feedback.
Carl Shapiro (Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy)
You can see Musk’s embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla’s abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn’t have “all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars” sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that’s what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they’re ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
The encouraging news is that when we have a good grasp of conversion, we realize that evangelism does not depend on eloquence, using the correct mood lighting, emotionally sappy stories and songs, or high-pressure sales pitches. We are free to simply and deeply trust God and the power of the gospel to produce the fruit he desires (Rom. 1:17). We realize that, though we are ambassadors for Christ pleading with men to be reconciled to God, it is God himself who makes the plea through us, his fellow workers (1 Cor. 3:9; 2 Cor. 5:20; 6:1), and his Spirit who guarantees that his Word will not return void (Isa. 55:11). We are to plant and water faithfully, confidently trusting that God will give the increase (1 Cor. 3:7).
Thabiti M. Anyabwile (What Is a Healthy Church Member?)
he who caused us to be told that we must prove the spirits, would not have done so unless he knew that we had infallible rules to tell the holy from the false spirit. We have such rules, and nobody denies it. But these deceivers produce rules which they can falsify and adapt to their pretensions, in order that, having rules in their hands, they may gain the credit of being masters in their craft by a visible sign under pretext of which they can form a faith and a religion such as they have imagined.
Francis de Sales (The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [15 Books])
The crafty merchant keeps out the worst articles of his stock to offer first to buyers, to try if he can get rid of them and sell them to some simpleton. The reasons which these reformers have advanced in the preceding chapter are but tricks, as we have seen, which are used only as it were for amusement, to try whether some simple and weak brain will be content with them, and in reality, when one comes to the grapple, they confess that not the authority of the Church, nor of S. Jerome, nor of the gloss, nor of the Hebrew, is cause sufficient to receive or reject any Scripture. The following is their protestation of faith presented to the King of France by the French pretended reformers. After having placed on the list, in the third article, the books they are willing to receive, they write thus in the fourth article: “We know these books to be canonical and a most safe rule of our faith, not so much by the common accord and consent of the Church, as by the testimony and interior persuasion of the Holy Spirit, which gives us to discern them from the other ecclesiastical books.” Quitting then the field of the reasons preceding, and making for cover, they throw themselves into the interior, secret and invisible persuasion which they consider to be produced in them by the Holy Spirit.
Francis de Sales (The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [15 Books])
(...) en cuanto sales de Europa, ya no hay más que mosquitos. Unos mosquitos verdes, venenosos y pequeños, que se cuelgan por todas partes. Y que dan fiebre, y sueño... y a veces, la locura. Pero no te asustes tú, mi héroe..., también hay mosquiteros, y cremas especiales para la piel. Y luego, ¡la Ciencia! Por cada mosquito que produce Dios, producen una inyección los alemanes.
Alejandro Casona (Prohibido suicidarse en primavera)
But,’ the chairman continued, ‘in this kind of store, it is normal and healthy for fashion to produce seventy per cent of sales. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account for three-fifths. And that’s abnormal. We’ve tried everything we know to make fashion grow to restore the normal ratio, but nothing works. The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.
Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Routledge Classics))
Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).
Eric Siegel (Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die)
Page 207 In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks. Page 208 At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!
Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
Page 10-11: Because of America's vigorous growth, and because the dollar plays a special role in the international economy, foreigners have been willing to finance the nation's imports and consumption. The bad news is that America's trade and investment deficits with the rest of the world (i.e., the amounts by which it is spending more than it is producing and borrowing more than it is lending) are growing so fast that they threaten to place the United States in the position of Thailand in 1997. That is to say, America's debts to the rest of the world may soon become large enough that its creditors could start wondering about the nation's ability to repay. Should foreigners lose faith in America's creditworthiness, they may start dumping dollars the way they dumped Thai baht. In that case, the American consumer would face significant belt-tightening to enable to country to start paying the debt down. Alternatively, the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates very high. This step would aim at persuading foreigners to keep up their lending by offering them higher rates of return on their loans, but it would also slow down the domestic economy by making the cost of money much more expensive for businesses and consumers. It would also add greatly to the total debt that would have to be repaid. ... A significant U.S. slowdown, therefore, would most likely leave the Japanese and Europeans (plus the Chinese and the rest of Asia and Latin America) with ever greater stockpiles of goods that no one could or would buy. These products would either languish on the shelf, or global price wars would break out, with each country trying to undercut the other in a frantic attempt to trim losses. Nations would either offer their goods for sale for much less than their production costs, or they would devalue their currencies, making them cheaper relative to other currencies. Thus their goods would automatically sell for less in foreign markets, and foreign goods would automatically become more expensive in their market.
Alan Tonelson (The Race To The Bottom: Why A Worldwide Worker Surplus And Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards)
Contact Marketing is the discipline of using micro-focused campaigns to break through to specific people of strategic importance, often against impossible odds, to produce a critical sale, partnership, or connection. A Contact Campaign is an instance of usage of Contact Marketing.
Stu Heinecke (How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing)
produced a document called, “A Securities Law Framework for Blockchain Tokens.”26 It is especially important for the team behind an ICO to utilize this document in conjunction with a lawyer to determine if a cryptoasset sale falls under SEC jurisdiction
Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn’t have “all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars” sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that’s what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they’re ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
As we know, ambitious women are under constant pressure to produce and achieve, much of it self-inflicted. If you’re a size six, get to four! If you get $1 million in sales, go for $1.5!
Morra Aarons-Mele (Hiding in the Bathroom: An Introvert's Roadmap to Getting Out There (When You'd Rather Stay Home))
Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....
Raj Patel (A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet)
Dacă ați încercat să vă adaptați unui tipar și nu ați reușit, probabil ați avut noroc. Sunteți poate o exilată, dar sufletul vostru se află a adăpost. Când cineva încearcă să se adapteze și nu reușește, se produce un fenomen ciudat. Proscrisul, alungat fiind, este în același timp împins chiar spre adevăratele sale afinități psihice, oricare ar fi acestea - o materie de studiu, o formă de artă sau un grup de oameni. Este mai rău să rămânem alături de cei cu care nu avem nimic în comun decât să rătăcim o vreme, în căutarea afinităților noastre sufletești și spirituale. Niciodată nu e greșit să căutăm ceea ce ne lipsește. Niciodată. Nenorocirea e și ea bună la ceva. În exil, bobocul de rață se călește, se întărește. Nu dorim nimănui și din niciun motiv să treacă prin așa ceva, dar efectul este similar formării diamantelor prin presiunea aplicată carbonului - ea duce în final la o profunzime și o claritate impresionantă a psihicului. Este oarecum asemănător procedeului alchimic în care elementul brut, plumbul, este bătut și aplatizat. Deși exilul în sine nu este de dorit, el ne aduce un beneficiu neașteptat, căci darurile exilului sunt nenumărate. Loviturile primite elimină slăbiciunea, pun capăt lamentărilor, sporesc înțelegerea, amplifică intuiția, conferă o putere de percepție și o perspectivă la care persoanele „acceptate” niciodată nu vor putea ajunge. Psihicul sălbatic poate îndura exilul, în ciuda aspectelor lui negative. Exilul ne face să dorim încă mai mult eliberarea adevăratei noastre naturi și o cultură care să-i corespundă. Tocmai această dorință vie, acest dor mistuitor ne determină să ne continuăm căutările. Iar dacă nu reușim să găsim contextul cultural care să ne stimuleze, hotărâm atunci să-l creăm noi însene. Și asta-i minunat, căci, dacă noi îl creăm, celelalte femei vor apare prin miracol într-o zi, spunând cu entuziasm că l-au căutat dintotdeauna.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run With the Wolves)
Human labour power is a unique commodity in that it produces surplus value – the amount of value that goes to the capitalist after the worker has been ‘paid’ for the part of the day that equates to the amount they and their family need to live on. The working day is split into two parts: necessary labour time and surplus labour time. Necessary labour time is the time it takes the worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy the commodities they need to reproduce themselves, ie to stay what is socially considered healthy enough to continue working. Surplus labour time is the time the worker works beyond necessary labour time. Since the going rate for labour power is necessary labour time, surplus labour time is surplus value that goes to the capitalist, realised through the sale of the commodities workers produce. For example: a worker in a toy factory is paid £10 a day to work 10 hours; she produces 10 toys a day, and a toy is worth £10 each. The capitalist is only paying the worker for her ability to work one hour each day to produce enough value to reproduce herself (one toy = one hour’s labour = £10). Her necessary labour time is one hour, and her surplus labour time that goes to the capitalist is nine hours. If the worker needs £10 a day to reproduce herself, then that £10 is the value of her labour power. If the capitalist cuts the daily wage below £10, he has pushed the wage below the value of labour power. (Indeed, struggles for better wages are usually struggles to push them back up to the proper value of labour power.) The price of labour power is determined like the price of any other commodity – on average, the cost of its production, ie necessary labour time. But if commodities are sold for the cost of their production then how does the capitalist make any profit? The capitalist purchases the worker’s human labour power  – the ability to work –  but, uniquely, always ends up with more than the amount it cost to purchase the commodity. The wage obscures the fact that the capitalist has only paid for necessary labour time. (Marx calls the social relations that are concealed by economic relations commodity fetishism.) Profit then is essentially unpaid labour. Wage labour is – especially for the poorest workers whose daily subsistence depends exclusively on the sale of their labour-power – wage-slavery. Marx’s investigations led him to realise that his analysis of capitalism must start with the commodity, since capitalism “presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities”.[66] What all commodities have in common is that they are all exchangeable  –  they all possess exchange-value. And as they are all products of labour, what they all have in common which gives them this exchange-value is general human labour in the abstract. Therefore, the total value of all commodities is determined by total socially necessary labour time – how long they took to produce. (The socially necessary labour time of each finished product includes that of each component that goes into it.)
Ted Reese (Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown)
Some 400,000 acres of fertile land were given over to opium cultivation; these could have produced food for malnourished Indians. When the elected Indian members of the impotent Central Legislature got their colleagues to pass a bill in 1921 prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, the government vetoed it by the simple expedient of refusing to act upon it, mindful, no doubt, of the fact that one-ninth of the government’s annual revenues came from drugs. When Mahatma Gandhi, no less, mounted a campaign against opium in Assam and succeeded in halving its consumption, the British responded by jailing him and forty-four of his satyagrahis.
Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
Let’s discuss our Swoosh-less Nike sneaker for a moment. My guess is that if you removed the branding from a pair of Nike Dunk sneakers, they would be worth no more than twenty-five percent of their retail price. That means that at least seventy-five percent of the value of a Nike sneaker is tied up in the emotional elements you can’t see or touch, the intangibles. But just because you can’t see them or touch them doesn’t mean they aren’t real. For a parallel example, let’s look at Kanye West’s relationship with Adidas. Kanye has little or no athletic prowess—he’s a musi- cian, a tastemaker, a hype man. Whatever you may think of Kanye, he gets people talking and has been able to use his brand to create value for his partners. And that’s exactly what he did when he designed a line of sneakers for Adidas, the Yeezy Boost. In February 2015, a limited run of his shoes sold out within ten minutes at a retail price of two hundred dollars. The shoes were then released to a wider audience a month later and once again sold out in record time. This is where things start to get interesting. According to Complex magazine, in the following quarter the Yeezy Boost accounted for $2.3 million in sales on eBay, three times the gross sales of its closest competitor, for an average price of $751 per pair. Let’s generously assume it cost Adidas fifty dollars per pair to produce and market a pair of Yeezy Boost. If that’s the case, Kanye West’s creativity is worth $701 per pair, and that doesn’t include the halo value to the overall Adidas brand.
Alan Philips (The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential)
When will go see the notary? His expression veered from sleepiness to astonishment. He sat up and fixed me with his blue eyes. Do you know that the viceroy offered me five hundred pesos for you? And do you know what I said? He raised his eyebrows in a challenge. I said no. He looked as though he expected me to congratulate him for this refusal. I opened my mouth to say something, but could not think of nothing to say - nothing to say, at any rate, that would not sound argumentative or disrespectful or even amusing to him. If I said, But you promised me, he might reply that I was questioning his word and a quarrel would erupt. If I said, I have waited long enough for my papers, he might ask what was the rush and what plans I was hiding from him. And if I said, You do not have a bill of sale any longer, he would have simply laughed and replied that it would take only one or two Castilian witnesses to produce a new bill of sale.
Laila Lalami (The Moor's Account)
Their society was deeply marked by the years under corrupt Ottoman rule. Rumanians had a saying: “The fish grows rotten from the head.” In Rumania almost everything was for sale: offices, licenses, passports. Indeed, a foreign journalist who once tried to change money legally instead of on the black market was thrown into jail by police who thought he must be involved in a particularly clever swindle. Every government contract produced its share of graft. Although Rumania was a wealthy country, rich in farmland and, by 1918, with a flourishing oil industry, it lacked roads, bridges and railways because the money allocated by government had been siphoned off into the hands of families such as Brătianu’s own. Rumanians tended to see intrigues everywhere. In Paris they hinted darkly that the Supreme Council had fallen under the sway of Bolshevism or, alternatively, that it had been bribed by sinister capitalist forces.280
Margaret MacMillan (Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World)
the U. S. Government once formed an Abaca Production and Sales bureau to take over the growing of hemp in four Central American countries, on the theory that hemp, which is used for the manufacture of rope, was vitally strategic. But this government-produced hemp was of such inferior quality that it couldn’t be sold, even to the Government’s own rope factory. To get out of its embarrassment, Abaca Production and Sales sold the worthless hemp to another Government agency, the Strategic Stockpile. The hemp was then stored, at taxpayers’ expense, in specially built warehouses. Each year the previour year’s crop was shoveled out and destroyed to make room to store the new crop. Total loss to the taxpayers averaged $3 million a year.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)