Product Description Quotes

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.

Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be. DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.

I also should have come up with a product description.

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.

The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.

I'd just like to reiterate that intuition and feeling are two different things. "Feeling" describes the product of emotions while "intuition" describes a honed internal skill of knowing. While feelings will change as emotions come and go; intuition is a description of a known truth whether or not tangible to logic or reason, at the moment.

A good description of photography necessitates that one treat it as an essence unto itself; not as an event either of the World or of philosophy, or as a syncretic sub-product of modern science and technology; that one recognize the existence, not just of a photographic art, but of an authentic photographic thought; the existence, beyond the components of technology and image production, of a certain specific relation to the real, one which knows itself as such.

It also helps to avoid short product descriptions, otherwise the Amazon bots might skip your title entirely.

In light of recent events—genocide in East Africa, the collapse of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third world—some might argue that the moment of truth has already passed, that Césaire and Fanon’s predictions proved false. We’re facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism, where descriptions of violence and instability draw on the very colonial language of “barbarism” and “backwardness” that Césaire critiques in these pages. But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters,

To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways

The other line of argument, which leads to the opposite conclusion, arises from looking at artificial automata. Everyone knows that a machine tool is more complicated than the elements which can be made with it, and that, generally speaking, an automaton A, which can make an automaton B, must contain a complete description of B, and also rules on how to behave while effecting the synthesis. So, one gets a very strong impression that complication, or productive potentiality in an organization, is degenerative , that an organization which synthesizes something is necessarily more complicated, of a higher order, than the organization it synthesizes. This conclusion, arrived at by considering artificial automaton, is clearly opposite to our early conclusion, arrived at by considering living organisms.

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.

Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole, and what with reference to man, who is a citizen of the highest city, of which all other cities are like families; what each thing is, and of what it is composed, and how long it is the nature of this thing to endure which now makes an impression on me, and what virtue I have need of with respect to it, such as gentleness, manliness, truth, fidelity, simplicity, contentment, and the rest. ... If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.

Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing.

It’s nearly nightfall, the vast evening sky as resplendent and intricate as that quilt hanging from the wooden knob on the side of Grandma’s dresser. This sky is like the work of a seamstress, sown tangerine-orange, raspberry-pink, and dappled with cream-white clouds for an extra touch, the finished product so lush and vibrant that I could gape at it for hours.

Moreover, some of the images covered by the definition go far beyond what can reasonably be considered pornographic. For example, "women's body parts . . . are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts." This description would include everything from blue jean commercials which zoom in on women's asses to cream ads which show perfectly manicured hands applying the lotion-the sort of advertisements that have appeared in Ms. magazine. Although it is commonplace to criticize such ads for using sex to sell products, it is a real stretch to call them pornographic.

Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products . The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description: creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.

Provide guidance, samples, and a deadline. Include a brief description of your product and perhaps a sample. Then offer to send them the entire product. Tell them the kind of endorsement you are looking for. The more specific, the better. I

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT … EATING Avoid distractions during meals and pay attention to the food you are consuming. Try to cultivate strong memories of the experience, which will help you to feel and stay sated. If you are trying to cut down on snacks, remind yourself what you ate for your last meal. You may find that recollection helps to curb hunger pangs. Be aware of food descriptions that create a sense of deprivation. Even if you are looking for low-calorie meals, try to find products that evoke a feeling of indulgence. When dieting, pay particular attention to flavor, texture, and presentation—anything that will heighten your enjoyment of the food and leave you feeling more satisfied afterward. Avoid sweetened drinks—it is hard for the body to adapt its energy regulation to their high calorie content. Enjoy the anticipation of food—this will prime your digestive response and help you to feel more satisfied afterward. Don’t feel guilty about the occasional treat, but instead relish the moment of pleasure.

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ‘Enough!’ I immediately feel my brain seizing up when I do that. Then, instead of being smart in handling the workload, it’s easy to make bad decisions,” he says. “You can end up catastrophizing, worrying about worst-case scenarios like missing deadlines and even losing your job. None of which helps you think any more clearly.” It’s a good description of how stressful it feels when our brain’s deliberate system gets swamped with demands, and how the resulting tumble into defensive mode makes it hard to be our most sensible selves.

Contractions. Kane’s stomach dropped right out of his body. He stared down at her, his mind going fuzzy. That was one of those words like menstruation, period, or female products . The list just wasn’t uttered in male company. Contractions fit right in there. God. This was not happening. He forced his brain under control, ignoring the pounding in his head and the roaring in his ears. He studied Rose’s body carefully. She wasn’t due for another four or five weeks, right? He knew when she got pregnant. When he’d first seen her, she had looked slim, but that had been an illusion. On the other hand, she never looked as— big —as she did at that moment.“What?” Rose demanded, glaring up at him. The warning signal flashed bright red in Kane’s head. Telling a woman she was as big as a beach ball wouldn’t win any points. How did one describe how she looked? A basketball? Volleyball? He studied her furious little face. Yeah. He was in trouble no matter what he said. Description was out of the question. He needed diplomacy, something that flew out the window when he was near her and she said words like contractions.He’d jump out of a plane without hesitation in the heart of enemy territory, but damn it all, ask him to kill someone, not deliver babies. She didn’t take her eyes off him, and that expression on her scowling face demanded an answer.

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.

I liked it when things went together like that. Not just timing things like the chop/ flick/ knock-stopping, but space things, too. Like all the man-made products that fit into other man-made products that were not made by the same men or for the same reasons. Like how the sucking wand of my parents’ vacuum held seven D batteries stacked nub to divot, and my Artgum eraser, before I’d worn it down, sat flush in any slot of the ice-cube tray, and the ice-cube tray sat flush on the rack in the toaster oven, the oven itself between the wall and the sink-edge. I liked how the rubber stopper in the laundry-room washtub was good for corking certain Erlenmeyer flasks and that 5 mg. Ritalins could be stored in the screw-hollows on the handles of umbrellas. (page 29-30)

I liked it when things went together like that. Not just timing things like the chop/ flick/ knock-stopping, but space things, too. Like all the man-made products that fit into other man-made products that were not made by the same men or for the same reasons. Like how the sucking wand of my parents’ vacuum held seven D batteries stacked nub to divot, and my Artgum eraser, before I’d worn it down, sat flush in any slot of the ice-cube tray, and the ice-cube tray sat flush on the rack in the toaster oven, the oven itself between the wall and the sink-edge. I liked how the rubber stopper in the laundry-room washtub was good for corking certain Erlenmeyer flasks and that 5 mg. Ritalins could be stored in the screw-hollows on the handles of umbrellas. The Instructions (pp. 29-30)

It was in Cleveland that Magic Slim became the most successful pornographic film producer in America. His training center was a key link in a human trafficking supply chain stretching from the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to the United States. Trafficking accounts for an estimated $32 billion in annual trade with sex slavery and pornographic film production accounting for the greatest percentage. The girls arrived at Slim’s building young and naive, they left older and wiser. This was a classic value chain with each link making a contribution.  Slim’s trainers were the best, and it showed in the final product. Each class of girls was judged on the merits. The fast learners went on to advanced training. They learned proper etiquette, social skills and party games. They learned how to dress, apply makeup and discuss world events.  Best in-class were advertised in international style magazines with code words. These codes were known only to select clients and certain intermediaries approved by Slim. This elaborate distribution system was part of Slim’s business model, his clients paid an annual subscription fee for the on-line dictionary. The code words and descriptions were revised monthly.  An interested client would pay an access fee for further information that included a set of professional  photographs, a video and voice recordings of the model addressing the client by name.  Should the client accept, a detailed travel itinerary was submitted calling for first class travel and accommodation.  Slim required a letter of understanding spelling out terms and conditions and a 50% deposit. He didn’t like contracts, his word was his bond, everyone along the chain knew that. Slim's business was booming.

Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising, anthropologist Maggie Graham observes in her recent paper. When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia and Alzheimer’s in particular can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be desire to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration. Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia supportive research charity, considers wandering an unhelpful description, because it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move. They may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or a person from their past that they believe to be close by; or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going. It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.

Tips for Mailings to Sell Professional Services Credibility is critical here. Descriptive items of fact (such as number of years in business, number of clients served, sample client lists, and so on) can all be of tremendous value. However, “believability” is even more important than “credibility.” The facts about your business, such as years in business, clients served, proprietary methods, and so on are important, but not nearly as persuasive as what clients have to say about their real-life experiences with you, benefits realized, and skepticism erased. Facts and credibility only support persuasion. Consider offering a free initial consultation or a free package of informative literature; this may break down barriers of skepticism and mistrust. Answer the question: why should the reader bother? Similarly, you should work at making the intangible benefits of your product tangible. This can be accomplished with before/after photographs, slice-of-life stories, case histories, or other examples. Demonstrate the value!

Milton’s treatment of Satan reminds us of the rabbis’ description of the “evil inclination” that is inextricably combined with human progress and productivity. Satan embodies many of the achievements of early modernity. When he embarks on his dangerous journey through Chaos, he becomes an intrepid early modern explorer, courageously seeking a New World; in his plan to invade Eden, he becomes a European coloniser; and, of course, he shares Milton’s passion for republican liberty when he inveighs against the monarchical elevation of the Son. Looking back on his moment of rebellion, he declares that he “sdeind [i.e., disdained] subjection”: “Will ye submit your necks, and chuse to bend / The supple knee?” he asks his fellow angels: Who can in reason then or right assume Monarchie over such as live by right His equals, if in power and splendor less, In freedom equal?70 Like the rabbis, Milton implied that evil was not an alien, omnipotent force; it was rather intricately combined with the creativity and inventiveness that were essential to human nature and its achievements.

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)

Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole, and what with reference to man, who is a citizen of the highest city, of which all other cities are like families; what each thing is, and of what it is composed, and how long it is the nature of this thing to endure which now makes an impression on me, and what virtue I have need of with respect to it, such as gentleness, manliness, truth, fidelity, simplicity, contentment, and the rest. Wherefore, on every occasion a man should say: this comes from God; and this is according to the apportionment and spinning of the thread of destiny, and such-like coincidence and chance; and this is from one of the same stock, and a kinsman and partner, one who knows not however what is according to his nature.

Chinese companies have been smuggling pill presses illegally into the United States, mislabeling them as machine tools or other items or sending them disassembled to avoid detection.69 The destination is drug dealers and criminal gangs70 for the “mass production” of street drugs.71 Now Chinese companies send large quantities of pill presses to Mexico, too, including the metal cast dies to imprint pills with counterfeit numbers such as “M523” and “10/352,” which are the markings of real oxycodone pills. In other words, these Chinese companies are helping dealers produce counterfeit and illegal street drugs.72 In April 2020, the DOJ sent out an alert to law enforcement agencies with a blunt headline: “Chinese Pill Presses Are Key Components for Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl.” In the document, which was obtained by the author, the DOJ noted the “relatively moderate pricing” of $1,000 per pill press—essentially at cost. Why are Chinese companies not charging a huge markup to sell the pill presses to the drug cartels? The DOJ also noted that the “ambiguous export regulations in China allow traffickers to use vague manifest descriptions to describe pill press machines to avoid scrutiny from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.”73 Chinese pill press manufacturers are required by US law to alert the DEA when they ship pill presses to the United States so federal authorities can track those who might be illegally producing drugs.

Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9 Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation.

For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages. The disappearance of that head start can be traced in detail, as the westward shift in powerful empires. After the rise of Fertile Crescent states in the fourth millennium B.C., the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent, rotating between empires such as those of Babylon, the Hittites, Assyria, and Persia. With the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally made its first shift irrevocably westward. It shifted farther west with Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., and after the fall of the Roman Empire it eventually moved again, to western and northern Europe. The major factor behind these shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expressions “Fertile Crescent” and “world leader in food production” are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.

Author’s Note Caroline is a marriage of fact and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction. I have knowingly departed from Wilder’s version of events only where the historical record stands in contradiction to her stories. Most prominently: Census records, as well as the Ingalls family Bible, demonstrate that Caroline Celestia Ingalls was born in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on August 3, 1870. (Wilder, not anticipating writing a sequel to Little House in the Big Woods, set her first novel in 1873 and included her little sister. Consequently, when Wilder decided to continue her family’s saga by doubling back to earlier events, Carrie’s birth was omitted from Little House on the Prairie to avoid confusion.) No events corresponding to Wilder’s descriptions of a “war dance” in the chapter of Little House on the Prairie entitled “Indian War-Cry” are known to have occurred in the vicinity of Rutland Township during the Ingalls family’s residence there. Drum Creek, where Osage leaders met with federal Indian agents in the late summer of 1870 and agreed peaceably to sell their Kansas lands and relocate to present-day Oklahoma, was nearly twenty miles from the Ingalls claim. I have therefore adopted western scholar Frances Kay’s conjecture that Wilder’s family was frightened by the mourning songs sung by Osage women as they grieved the loss of their lands and ancestral graves in the days following the agreement. In this instance, like so many others involving the Osages, the Ingalls family’s reactions were entirely a product of their own deep prejudices and misconceptions.

If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two? In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity,

When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness) of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre attracts to itself that which is proper to it, the “signs of the Father,” i.e., everything that pertains to the original and unalterable character of the individual ground-plan. All this is older than the ego and acts towards it as the “blessed, nonexistent God” of the Basilidians acted towards the archon of the Ogdoad, the demiurge, and—paradoxically enough—as the son of the demiurge acted towards his father. The son proves superior in that he has knowledge of the message from above and can therefore tell his father that he is not the highest God. This apparent contradiction resolves itself when we consider the underlying psychological experience. On the one hand, in the products of the unconscious the self appears as it were a priori, that is, in well-known circle and quaternity symbols which may already have occurred in the earliest dreams of childhood, long before there was any possibility of consciousness or understanding. On the other hand, only patient and painstaking work on the contents of the unconscious, and the resultant synthesis of conscious and unconscious data, can lead to a “totality,” which once more uses circle and quaternity symbols for purposes of self-description.15 In this phase, too, the original dreams of childhood are remembered and understood. The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the uroboros, the snake that bites its own tail.

Intelligence finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with the empty form – the pretense of finding reason: and its aim is to realise its concept or to be reason actual, along with which the content is realised as rational. This activity is cognition. The nominal knowledge, which is only certitude, elevates itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge. The course of this elevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or term of intelligent activity (a so-called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which such cognition gives of the semblance that the rational is found, starts from the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability of rational knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason, which it and the content virtually is. The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition (knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence inter alia knows – besides which it also intuits, conceives, remembers, imagines, etc. To take up such a position is in the first instance, part and parcel of that isolating of mental activity just censured; but it is also in addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible – which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the bulk of this question are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes its simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not. But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realises itself, or makes the concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realising activity are intuition, conception, memory, etc.: these activities have no other immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445 note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even as isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physical nature succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality – its out-of-selfness – exhibiting the elements or factors of immanent reason external to each other – that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but the same result may happen where the intelligence is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted, is only afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by reason and exhibit ideas – in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitive conception, etc. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition, conception, etc. are not isolated, and exist only as ‘moments’ in the totality of cognition itself.

As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos. There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.) Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.

Messages that tell us we aren’t pretty enough, young enough, thin enough, or desirable enough are garbage. Anyone who implies we are unable to care for our own families is lying. If you believe the persona that marketing culture has crafted --helpless, too stressed, overwhelmed, incompetent (without their products)-- I am here to say otherwise. You are not a moron or a damsel in distress. You are smart and able, and getting older is not a tragedy. Don’t believe them. Even if some observations are descriptive, they need not be prescriptive. You are not a total hot disaster! Well, no more than any of us. You can do hard things. (Some “hard things” are actually “easy things” rebranded as impossible.) You are more than some company’s profitability, and you don’t need their tricks to live a beautiful, meaningful life. We can reclaim our merit without dancing like monkeys.

The Amazon version of the Andon Cord started with a conversation about a customer care problem during a weekly business review. The issue centered on the way mistakes made by one set of employees—those working in the retail group—were creating headaches for a different set—those in the customer care department. “When the people in the retail group don’t provide the right data for the customer, or enter a product description that’s inaccurate,” the head of customer care explained, “the customer is disappointed with the purchase. And that means they call customer care, which lands us with the hassle of refunding the product.

And as Mipham goes on to say, all descriptive indications of the actual ultimate are no more than vague metaphors. “For the actual ultimate in itself is beyond all conceptual constructs such as existence or nonexistence, production or nonproduction, and so on. It is not the domain of thought and language; it is what the Aryas see with the utterly stainless primordial wisdom of meditative equipoise.

Most men confuse the denotation of concepts with the connotation of them. The former means which part of reality you indicate under the concept, while the latter indicates which attributes you include into that reality. Complete various usage. You believe in God, I believe in God, both of us intuitively realize which part of reality we represent by the concept of ‘God’. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your concept of ‘God’ and my concept of ‘God’ is the same with the respect to its content. So maybe God is, in my mind, only uncaused cause point in the cause-effect chain -- God is the cause of everything in the Universe, but it doesn’t need any cause for its existence. God is a termination, the convergence point of various cause-effect chains. Maybe, it seems more logical and rational for me, but it doesn’t necessarily require the belief in omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. All of them are the essential attributes of God, which can differ from you to me. Well, maybe I don’t believe that God can foreknow everything, that everything necessarily represent God’s will and God can change everything according to his will, break any natural regularity, which are being investigated by science and on which science predicts the future possible conditions of everything, and that God is strongly involved in the whole human civilization’s life and without his permission nobody and nothing could destroy that life. Similarly, maybe you could effectively argue that some of the writings in the Holy Scripture are true and maybe I, as a reasonable agnostic, would agree with you. However, even this fact wouldn’t mean that I think that the Holy Scripture is the product of divine knowledge but not human. Then maybe I seek for symbols and allegories there, which can stand for cosmological, historical, sexual visions of various ancient civilizations, but you seek after sacred texts for blind acceptance and examples for blind imitation. That is why before saying that somebody believes in God, think over what he means by claiming it; before being surprised at ‘miracles’ in Holy Scripture, turn over in your mind whether it could come into some rational human mind without any divine knowledge and figure out whether there had been similar mythological ‘miracle’ descriptions in ancient civilizations before that Holy Scripture. If you can free your mind from any religious presuppositions, quiet contemplation around it can change your vision of God and religious belief.

Get Noticed In Cyber Space With SEO Do you own a website or blog and want to get the most out of it by increasing your traffic without spending a dime? Then you should look into the world of search engine optimization! Search engine optimization gets more people to your site for free. Read on to learn how you, too, can do this! When designing your site for SEO, make sure to include relevant keywords in the title tag. Since these words will show up as the title to your page, it is the single most important place to put the relevant keywords. However, make sure your title tag is no more than six to seven words in length. Using flash files is not a good idea for search engine optimization. Be aware of using flash as it can be very slow to load, and users will get frustrated. In addition, search engine spiders will not read keywords that are found in flash files. When marketing a product online, make sure your site is as useable and accessible as possible. If your website has problems with the code or can't be viewed by certain browsers, you will lose visitors and therefore sales. Very few people will go to the trouble of switching browsers just to use your site. When optimizing your website, be sure to optimize your description meta tag as well. Some experts believe that keyword meta tags are nearly worthless today, as search engines no longer use them, but that descriptions will usually show up under your page title on the results page, and they are also involved in the indexing process. With search engine optimization, your blog or website can get way more traffic by appearing early on lists of search results for terms related to your business. Apply these easy, free, and effective techniques to maximize your traffic and use that traffic to maximize your profits. Why wait? Start now! Use these tips for successful SEO of any business online and try visit holisticmade.com

Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many. On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed. On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.

One powerful method for getting at purpose is the five whys. Start with the descriptive statement We make X products or We deliver X services, and then ask, Why is that important? five times. After a few whys, you’ll find that you’re getting down to the fundamental purpose of the organization. We

A game concept is a description of a game detailed enough to begin discussing it as a potential commercial product—a piece of software that the public might want to buy.

Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions. It was both descriptive and prescriptive – it offered an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits in production leads to fast economic growth. But capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill. Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.

What’s the effect of this attitude of gratitude on Southern children? Well, we think it’s summed up by this description of Mississippi Grits Sela Ward: “Her niceness is genuine, the product of a small-town Southern upbringing that left her with a lasting appreciation for the generosity of spirits that surrounded her as a child. It’s not just about disarming smiles and gracious manners, though they’re part of her charm. It’s more about her openness, her unpretentiousness, and her self-deprecating sense of humor.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)

In many ways, the treatment of animal homosexuality in the scientific discourse has closely parallelled the discussion of human homosexuality in society at large. Homosexuality in both animals and people has been considered, at various times, to be a pathological condition; a social aberration; an "immoral", "sinful", or "criminal" perversion; an artificial product of confinement or the unavailability of the opposite sex; a reversal or "inversion" of heterosexual "roles"; a "phase" that younger animals go through on the path to heterosexuality; an exceptional but unimportant activity; a useless and puzzling curiosity; and a functional behavior that "stimulates" or "contributes to" heterosexuality. In many other respects, however, the outright hostility to animal homosexuality has transcended all historical trends. One need only look at the litany of derogatory terms, which have remained essentially constant from the late 1800s to the present day, used to describe this behavior: words such as strange, bizarre, perverse, aberrant, deviant, abnormal, anomalous, and unnatural have all been used routinely in "objective" scientific descriptions of the phenomenon and continue to be used (one of the most recent examples is from 1997). In addition, heterosexual behavior is consistently defined in numerous scientific accounts as "normal" in contrast to homosexual activity... In a direct carryover from attitudes toward human homosexuality, same-sex activity is routinely described as being "forced" on other animals when there is no evidence that it is, and a whole range of "distressful" emotions are projected onto the individual who experiences such "unwanted advances"... In other cases, zoologists have problematized homosexual activity or imputed an inherent inadequacy, instability, or incompetence to same-sex relations, when the supporting evidence for this is scanty or questionable at best and nonexistent at worst.

Metaphors are often very useful in elucidating complicated problems and in making them comprehensible to less intelligent minds. But they become misleading and result in nonsense if people forget that every comparison is imperfect. It is silly to take metaphorical idioms literally and to deduce from their interpretation features of the object one wished to make more easily understandable by their use. There is no harm in the economists' description of the operation of the market as automatic and in their custom of speaking of the anonymous forces operating on the market. They could not anticipate that anybody would be so stupid as to take these metaphors literally. No "automatic" and "anonymous" forces actuate the "mechanism" of the market. The only factors directing the market and determining prices are purposive acts of men. There is no automatism; there are men consciously aiming at ends chosen and deliberately resorting to definite means for the attainment of these ends. There are no mysterious mechanical forces; there is only the will of every individual to satisfy his demand for various goods. There is no anonymity; there are you and I and Bill and Joe and all the rest. And each of us is engaged both in production and consumption. Each contributes his share to the determination of prices.

A gardener! Isn’t that the perfect description of what a real businessman is? A person who makes a flinty soil productive with the labor of his own hands, who waters it with the sweat of his own brow, and who creates a place of value for his family and for the community

I have lived my whole life as a Black man in the United States. I don't have to go all the way back to Tulsa and Rosewood and Emmett Till to know what it means for a white woman to accuse a Black man, and who would likely be believed. This was potentially a world of trouble heading my way. Her fingers were already dialing; in a split second of self-preservation, I considered that if I just stopped recording, maybe this would go away. Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.

Hayek echoed Robbins’s description of the Common Room as a place where, despite sharp political differences, the ambiance was friendly, an atmosphere that suited his own tastes well (Hayek 1994, 81). Some examples of the kind of collegial repartee that was characteristic of the School was a “Mock Trial” of economists that Director Beveridge organized in June 1933 (reported in the Economist, June 17, 1933) or Beveridge’s address (titled “My Utopia”) before the School’s Cosmopolitan Club at the beginning of the Michaelmas term in 1934. In the latter Beveridge (1936) spoke of an “elaborate apparatus” that had been invented by “John Maynard von Hayek” which had apparently solved the problem of making money neutral: “So far as I can make out, it automatically changes the air and so affects the blood pressure of bankers and businessmen, as prices rise or fall in relation to productive efficiency” (135). There were also regular events to mark the end of term, all dutifully entered by Hayek into his appointment book: the Christmas party at the end of Michaelmas term and the Strawberry Tea at the end of summer term.

The University of California, Berkeley, one of ten Universities in California, is in fact about to inaugurate, for the student season 2022-2023, a new course dedicated to rapper and singer, Nicki Minaj, entitled “The Galaxy of Hip-Hop Feminisms.” According to its description, “the constellation of dynamic voices, theories, and productions of underground and mainstream Black feminine rappers who have influenced the origins of Hip-Hop and its ongoing evolution.” It will also examine the “the genealogy and nuance of key Black feminine rappers and theoreticians in the field, practice, and culture of Hip-Hop Feminisms across the Black Diaspora.” Also, very interesting to understand is the “woke” propaganda, which is recommended readings for the course, that even include pornographic material, which come from supposed “Cultural Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Porn Studies, Media & Film Studies, and Performance Studies.

By extending this argument to the observer’s use of any observation, rather than just an utterance, we can provide the following provisional formulation of a major theme of our discussion. The observer has to base his analysis on shifting ground. He is faced with the task of producing an ordered version of observations and utterances when each of his readings of observations and utterances can be counter-balanced with an alternative. In principle, then, the task of producing an incorrigible version of the actions and behaviour of the subjects of his study is hopeless. Nevertheless, we know that observers regularly produce such ordered versions for consumption by others. His production of order must therefore be done “for practical purposes,” which means that he proceeds by evading or ignoring difficulties of principle.5 If this is the case, then it becomes important to understand how observers routinely ignore the philosophical problem of the constant availability of alternative descriptions and readings. In other words, one reaction to the recognition of these fundamental problems is to investigate the methods and procedures by which observers produce ordered versions of the utterances and observations which they have accumulated. The focus of investigation from this point of view is the production of order.

Although a book or story may provide lengthy descriptions of characters, plots, and scenery, our imagination and creativity bring them to life in our minds.

Above all, the story of the Stato da Mar is a saga about trade. Alone in all the world, Venice was organized to buy and sell. The Venetians were merchants to their fingertips; they calculated risk, return, and profit with scientific precision. The red and gold lion banner of Saint Mark fluttered from mastheads like a corporate logo. Trade was their creation myth and their justification, for which they were frequently reviled by more terrestrial neighbors. There exists no more explicit description of the city's raison d'être and its anxieties than the appeal it made to the pope in 1343 for permission to trade with the Muslim world: "Since, by the Grace of God, our city has grown and increased by the labors of merchants creating traffic and profits for us in diverse parts of the world by land and sea and this is our life and that of our sons, because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade, therefore we must be vigilant in all our thoughts and endeavors, as our predecessors were, to make provision in every way lest so much wealth and treasure should disappear." The appeal's gloomy conclusion echoes a manic-depressive streak in the Venetian soul. The city's prosperity rested on nothing tangible — no landholdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that, if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.

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Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure.

Market view analysis generally includes a series of components: ·      Market focus ·      Size of your market and its anticipated growth rate ·      Overview of your company’s current market position ·      Description of the market segments you serve ·      Matrix of your top competitors by market segment ·      More detailed breakdown of the competitors ·      Overview of your current position with a focus on possible market opportunities ·      Buy-versus-build opportunities ·      Possible acquisition candidates ·      List of risks and contingencies ·      Potential competitive movements ·      Deep dives into specific competitors

There are two distinct branches of data mining, predictive and descriptive/exploratory (Figure 1.2), that can turn raw data into actionable knowledge. Sometimes you hear these two categories called directed (predictive) and undirected (descriptive). Predictive models use known results to develop (or train or estimate) a model that can be used to predict values for different data. Descriptive models describe patterns in existing data that may be found in new data. With descriptive models, there is no target variable for which you are striving to predict the value. Most of the big payoff has been in predictive modeling when the models are operationalized in a real-world setting.

At the same time, Cannon's description of organic homeostasis reveals the inherent limitation of any automatic system as it approaches perfection. This is a point I made independently in discussing mass production and automation: namely, that it tends to become rigid and static unless it leaves room for factors outside the system and provides a means for growth by drawing on a larger environment and a richer fund of experience than that which has been programmed in the automatic system itself.

Here are descriptions of the five customer segments: Innovators are technology enthusiasts who pride themselves on being familiar with the latest and greatest innovation. They enjoy fiddling with new products and exploring their intricacies. They are more willing to use an unpolished product that may have some shortcomings or tradeoffs, and are fine with the fact that many of these products will ultimately fail. Early Adopters are visionaries who want to exploit new innovations to gain an advantage over the status quo. Unlike innovators, their interest in being first is not driven by an intrinsic love of technology but rather the opportunity to gain an edge. The Early Majority are pragmatists that have no interest in technology for its own sake. These individuals adopt new products only after a proven track record of delivering value. Because they are more risk averse than the first two segments, they feel more comfortable having strong references from trusted sources and tend to buy from the leading company in the product category. The Late Majority are risk-averse conservatives who are doubtful that innovations will deliver value and only adopt them when pressured to do so, for example, for financial reasons, due to competitive threats, or for fear of being reliant on an older, dying technology that will no longer be supported. Laggards are skeptics who are very wary of innovation. They hate change and have a bias for criticizing new technologies even after they have become mainstream.

Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality—these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline.” —Jason Fried, co-founder, 37signals Your content and copy are the way you woo your customers. They are your voice and the way you communicate your brand’s personality.

I saw another young man coming down the stairs from the third floor with my blanc de chine Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, in his hand. [. . .] He swung the arm holding the Guanyin carelessly in the air and declared, 'This is a figure of Buddhist superstition. I'm going to throw it in the trash.' The Guanyin was a perfect specimen and a genuine product of the Dehua kiln in Fujian province. It was the work of the famous 17th century Ming sculptor Chen Wei and bore his seal on the back. The beauty of the creamy-white figure was beyond description. The serene expression of the face was so skillfully captured that it seemed to be alive. The folds of the robe flowed so naturally that one forgot it was cared out of hard biscuit. The glaze was so rich and creamy that the whole figure looked as if it were soft to the touch. [. . .] By this time, I no longer thought of them as my own possessions. I did not care to whom they belonged after tonight as long as they were saved from destruction.

Al Capp’s description of abstract art: “A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality—these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline.” —Jason Fried, co-founder, 37signals

This desire will be reflected in the job descriptions for

He made his job descriptions sound like a steady upward spiral toward success. Of his days as movie usher and popcornmaker he said, “I was in Los Angeles working in the theater business for about a year. . . . I was working for the National General Corporation, which was a multinational conglomerate. They both own theaters and motion production companies. My long-range interest at the time was hopefully to get into screenwriting, so I worked for the theater in the corporation with the hope of getting into screenwriting. The theater I worked at was within about a mile’s drive of Universal Studios, where National General did a lot of their filming. So I was close to where I was trying to break into it.

SECTION SUMMARY TO BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER … Recognize that you have limited strengths. Do whatever it takes to discover what they are. Once you know, find a work environment that allows you to focus your energies on the few things you were created to do well. Don’t allow your time to get eaten up with responsibilities and projects that call for skills that fall outside your core competencies. That is a recipe for mediocrity. Embrace this truth: The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Narrow your focus to increase your productivity and expand your influence within your organization. Empower the leaders around you by delegating those responsibilities that fall outside your zone. Somebody is dying to pick up the ball you drop. Your weakness is his opportunity. Remember: Great leaders know when to follow. THE NEXT GENERATION CHALLENGE What defines success for you in your current employment situation? Is there alignment between your core competencies and those competencies necessary to succeed in your job? What would change about your current job description if you were given the freedom to focus on the two or three things you do best? What would need to change in your current employment situation in order for you to focus on the things that add the most value to your organization? Take some time to complete the exercises described on this page through this page.

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped:   Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining?   Was customer satisfaction rising or falling?   What did our own engineers think of the products? By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box. The white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers. It penalizes managers who sacrifice the future for the short term and rewards those who invest in the future even if that investment cannot be easily measured. CLOSING THOUGHT It is easy to see that there are many ways for leaders to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you were trying to fix.

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His other deals had tended to bring together companies from the same industry horizontally, or merge customers with their suppliers vertically, or bring together firms involved in different steps of manufacturing or marketing: this was known as a circular merger. But the merger that had produced C-T-R was, as Flint put it when he looked back on it later in his career, neither horizontal nor vertical nor circular. In fact, it was so uncommon as to almost justify the description sui generis—in a class by itself. Flint soon turned out to be right yet again. The C-T-R merger was a success from the outset. Flint was careful to ensure that a gospel of technical excellence and constant improvement of the new organization’s products was fundamental to its business philosophy.

The ultimate realization of the Internet of Things will be to transmit actual things through the Internet. Users can already send descriptions of objects that can be made with personal digital fabrication tools, such as 3-D printers and laser cutters. As data turn into things and things into data, long manufacturing supply chains can be replaced by a process of shipping data over the Internet to local production facilities that would make objects on demand, where and when they were needed.

The old order types were simple and straightforward and mainly sensible. The new order types that accompanied the explosion of high-frequency trading were nothing like them, either in detail or spirit. When, in the summer of 2012, the Puzzle Masters gathered with Brad and Don and Ronan and Rob and Schwall in a room to think about them, there were maybe one hundred fifty different order types. What purpose did each serve? How might each be used? The New York Stock Exchange had created an order type that ensured that the trader who used it would trade only if the order on the other side of his was smaller than his own order; the purpose seemed to be to prevent a high-frequency trader from buying a small number of shares from an investor who was about to crush the market with a huge sale. Direct Edge created an order type that, for even more complicated reasons, allowed the high-frequency trading firm to withdraw 50 percent of its order the instant someone tried to act on it. All of the exchanges offered something called a Post-Only order. A Post-Only order to buy 100 shares of Procter & Gamble at $80 a share says, “I want to buy a hundred shares of Procter & Gamble at eighty dollars a share, but only if I am on the passive side of the trade, where I can collect a rebate from the exchange.” As if that weren’t squirrely enough, the Post-Only order type now had many even more dubious permutations. The Hide Not Slide order, for instance. With a Hide Not Slide order, a high-frequency trader—for who else could or would use such a thing?—would say, for example, “I want to buy a hundred shares of P&G at a limit of eighty dollars and three cents a share, Post-Only, Hide Not Slide.” One of the joys of the Puzzle Masters was their ability to figure out what on earth that meant. The descriptions of single order types filed with the SEC often went on for twenty pages, and were in themselves puzzles—written in a language barely resembling English and seemingly designed to bewilder anyone who dared to read them. “I considered myself a somewhat expert on market structure,” said Brad. “But I needed a Puzzle Master with me to fully understand what the fuck any of it means.” A Hide Not Slide order—it was just one of maybe fifty such problems the Puzzle Masters solved—worked as follows: The trader said he was willing to buy the shares at a price ($80.03) above the current offering price ($80.02), but only if he was on the passive side of the trade, where he would be paid a rebate. He did this not because he wanted to buy the shares. He did this in case an actual buyer of stock—a real investor, channeling capital to productive enterprise—came along and bought all the shares offered at $80.02. The high-frequency trader’s Hide Not Slide order then established him as first in line to purchase P&G shares if a subsequent investor came into the market to sell those shares. This was the case even if the investor who had bought the shares at $80.02 expressed further demand for them at the higher price. A Hide Not Slide order was a way for a high-frequency trader to cut in line, ahead of the people who’d created the line in the first place, and take the kickbacks paid to whoever happened to be at the front of the line.

Stephen Anderson, author of Seductive Interaction Design, created a tool called Mental Notes to help designers build better products through heuristics.[lxviii] Each of the cards in his deck of 50 contains a brief description of a cognitive bias and is intended to spark product team conversations around how they might utilize the principle.

The term “organization” thus suggests a certain bareness, a lean, no-nonsense system of consciously co-ordinated activities.[1] It refers to an expendable tool, a rational instrument engineered to do a job. An “institution,” on the other hand, is more nearly a natural product of social needs and pressures—a responsive, adaptive organism. This distinction is a matter of analysis, not of direct description. It does not {6} mean that any given enterprise must be either one or the other. While an extreme case may closely approach either an “ideal” organization or an “ideal” institution, most living associations resist so easy a classification. They are complex mixtures of both designed and responsive behavior.

The Bible contains significant teachings that encourage the creation of goods and services. One example is the description of an “excellent wife” in Proverbs 31:10–31: “She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant” (v. 24). She makes valuable products and so increases the GDP of Israel. This woman is productive, for “she seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands” (v. 13). She produces agricultural products from the earth, because “with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard” (v. 16). She sells products in the marketplace, because “she perceives that her merchandise is profitable” (v. 18). (The Holman Christian Standard Bible translates this as, “She sees that her profits are good”; this is also a legitimate translation because the Hebrew term sakar can refer to profit or gain from merchandise.)

swoopers write a story quickly, which in his description is: “higgledly-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work; [while] bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.

He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.

Step 6: When Filofax grew enormously in the 1980s as an expensive, aspirational product, the absence of a generic niche description became a problem for the leader. People began to use ‘filofax’ to describe the category, which meant that every competitor could describe their product as a filofax (note the lower case f ). In 1986 David Collischon wisely coined the term ‘personal organiser’ to describe the category and encouraged everyone to use the term. Marketing experts are adamant that it is easier for us to think first about a category generally, and then about the brand. ‘I need a personal organiser to keep all my bits of paper.What brand should I ask for in the shop? Well, Filofax is the best known.’ This is an easier and more natural way of thinking than, ‘I need a Filofax.’ The clear benefit of a personal organiser was that it helped people be better organised . If the term ‘personal organiser’ had not gained widespread currency the benefit of the new category would have been much less clear, and Filofax’s brand name would have become devalued. Contrast the confusion caused in the electronic-organiser niche. When this developed in the 1990s, the leading brand was PalmPilot. But what was the category name? As Al and Laura Ries comment, ‘Some people call the Palm an electronic organiser. Others call the Palm a handheld computer. And still others, a PDA (personal digital assistant). All of these names are too long and complicated. They lack the clarity and simplicity a good category name should possess. If . . . a personal computer that fits on your lap is called a laptop computer, then the logical name for a computer that fits in the palm of your hand is a palm computer . . . Of course, Palm Computer pre-empted Palm as a brand name, leaving a nascent industry struggling to find an appropriate generic name . . . Palm Computer should have been just as concerned with choosing an appropriate generic name as it was in choosing an appropriate brand name.’9

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The simplest type of headline simply says what the product is, and what it does. The basic formula is ‘[Product] is a [description] that helps you [action].’ For example: Amazon Dash Button is a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite product with the press of a button.

What does a merchant do when a potential customer walks into a store and wants to purchase a ton of goods on credit? A solution was offered by the “The Society of Guardians for the Protection of Trade against Swindlers and Sharpers,” established in 1776. This society pooled data from 550 merchants to collect information on the reputation of customers. This would make it much harder for a bad customer to defraud multiple merchants. Its key principle: “Every member is bound to communicate to the Society without delay, the Name and Description of any Person who may be unfit to trust.” In other words, this was the beginning of credit scores as a means to assess the trustworthiness of a customer for loans—no swindlers or sharpers allowed. This Society of Guardians was not the only credit bureau—thousands of similar small organizations were formed over the years, collecting individual names and publishing books with various comments and gossip. Modern giants Experian and Equifax grew from these small, local bureaus. Experian started as the Manchester Guardian Society in the early 1800s, eventually acquiring other bureaus to become one of the world’s largest. And Equifax grew from a Tennessee grocery store in the late 1800s, where the owners started compiling their own lists of creditworthy consumers. These bureaus tended to combine into larger bureaus over time because of what’s often described as a “data network effect.” When a bureau works with more merchants, it means more data, which means the risk predictions on loans will be more accurate. This makes it more attractive for additional merchants to join, who contribute even more data, and so on. Being able to accurately assess lending risk allows the rest of the network to function—consumers can borrow to get the goods they want, merchants can sell their products profitably, and banks can help underwrite the loans. This network is held together by credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, who centralize consumer data.

The patent expressly guarantees the inventor “the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling” the idea for the twenty-year life of the patent. The patent holder can, if he chooses, issue licenses to others to make, use, or sell the idea. The license fees can bring in large sums of money. If anybody tries to market the patented product without obtaining a license, the inventor can go into federal court to get an injunction and money damages. Not a bad deal at all for the inventor. In exchange for those benefits, though, the patent holder has to reveal all the secrets of his success. The patent law says that an inventor must provide “a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in . . . full, clear, concise and exact terms.” The inventor and his company might have expended a dozen years and a hundred million dollars perfecting the idea; once a patent is granted, anybody in the world can acquire the plans—full, clear, concise, and exact—from the Patent Office for $3. If, for example, John S. Pemberton had applied for a patent for the formula he whipped up in his backyard in Atlanta one day in the mid-1880s, the product that he invented—a soft drink that he named Coca-Cola—would have entered the public domain in 1903, when the patent expired. Anybody in the world would have been free from that day forward to brew and sell the drink without paying a penny to the Coca-Cola Company. But Pemberton kept his formula unpatented, and thus secret. Even without a patent, Coca-Cola has been able to defend its formula under a body of law known as trade secret protection, which makes it illegal to copy deliberately somebody else’s commercial idea.

I can picture purchasing a product, such as a vehicle, a bicycle, or even grocery items, and seeing the emissions to produce the item and transport it to its location on its product tag, or by scanning its bar code. Items with top quartile emissions or high ESG performance for the category may have a different color-coded tag. The price tag will become a product tag and information about the item and the producer would be available in its online description,

John Doerr, the venture capitalist who backed Amazon early and was on its board of directors for a decade, has dubbed Amazon’s miserly public-relations style “the Bezos Theory of Communicating.” He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.

The freelance EIC had at its peak just 1,500 administrative officers and about 19,000 police and soldiers for an area one third the size of the continental United States. As such, it exerted virtually no control over most areas, which were in the hands either of Arab slave-traders and African warlords, or of native soldiers nominally in the employ of Belgian concession companies without a white man for a hundred miles. Hochschild’s description of the EIC as “totalitarian” is bizarre, as is his claim that Léopold exerted a “framework of control…across his enormous realm.” If only this were true.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

A full spectrum of products exploit the disruptions of modern life to help us cope with this stress, to make us temporarily less unhappy—and to hook us with a promised return to some imagined state of bliss. The physical environment drives us, through anxiety and opportunity, to the kinds of behaviors that generate more inflammation: overeating, drug use, and self-isolation.118 Chronic stress makes the body vulnerable to addiction,119 increasing levels of emotional stress cause decreased impulse control,120 and the more chronic the stress becomes, the more maladaptive the behavior becomes.121 Chronic stress dampens activity in the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational decision making and self-control—and heightens activity in the limbic system, which includes the amygdala, an ancient center of the brain that guides impulsive behavior.122 Global industries intuitively understand this connection between the endocrine and nervous systems, encouraging addiction and overconsumption as a path to happiness, a dynamic that David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.”123 As Facebook cofounder Sean Parker explained, social media are engineered to hijack our need for social connection, offering “a little dopamine hit” to the reward centers of the brain through likes and retweets and views.124 This is not exactly an accurate description of the complex neurobiology at play, but it is a fair assessment of how Facebook keeps us coming back for more.125

We found instead that two-pizza teams could also operate successfully in a matrix organization model, where each team member would have a solid-line reporting relationship to a functional manager who matched their job description—for example, director of software development or director of product management—and a dotted-line reporting relationship to their two-pizza manager. This meant that individual two-pizza team managers could lead successfully even without expertise in every single discipline required on their team. This functional matrix ultimately became the most common structure, though each two-pizza team still devised its own strategies for choosing and prioritizing its projects.

Write a blog post on [topic] that is structured and easy to read. Begin with a clear and concise introduction that sets the tone and provides context for the topic. Use headings, subheadings, and clear paragraphs to organize and illustrate the content, making sure that the final product is organized and easy to follow. In the body of the post, make sure that each section is clearly defined and contributes to the overall message of the post. Consider the readability of the final product by using clear and concise language, while avoiding jargon or overly complex terminology. Finally, include a clear and concise conclusion that summarizes your main points and reinforces the importance of your argument. Repurposing a Blog Post for Different Audiences Description: This prompt will guide you in repurposing a blog post on the topic of your choice for a different target audience.

Want to be more concrete? Focus on the how. How does a product meet consumer needs? How does a proposed new initiative address an important problem? Thinking about how something is or will be done encourages concreteness. It focuses on the feasibility and helps generate concrete descriptions. Want to be more abstract? Focus on the why. Why does a product meet consumer needs? Why does a proposed new initiative address an important problem? Thinking about why something is good or right encourages abstractness. It focuses on its desirability and helps generate abstract descriptions.

Hochschild just can’t seem to get over the fact that life was very, very different long ago. I, for one, am less ready to leap to condemnation for the petty abuses of the EIC, especially against people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. If he wants to join the Congo Reform Movement, so be it. It has been going on for over 100 years and is not likely to stop. When I call this white guilt porn, I do not intend it as polemic, but merely description.

Tom Durrie (b. 1931) is a school critic, a nonagenarian giant, and a poster boy for longevity and vitality of a happy brain. His biography is rich beyond description, and reflects Durrie's infinite passion for life. His CV would suffice to fill in a few lifetimes, and is the best testimony that a rich and productive life is a self-sustaining process. Inspired by A.S. Neill (Summerhill 1960), Durrie found his own formula for free learning. Durrie has tried teaching in traditional and in alternative schools (for a sum total of over a decade). He was also a headmaster of a free school for a while. In 1966, the analysis of his teaching experience provides a unique insight into the impact of freedom on behavior and mental health of students. His text, published 54 years late (2020), can be found here: "Free learning in a public school". Durrie's three successful children received minimal schooling. None attended high school. Over decades of his analysis and interests, Durrie noticed cyclical processes, in which the school system tightens its grip on children and then enters a period of rebellion, and seeking new solutions only to fall back again into its hungry propensity for limiting child freedoms.