Rate Of Change Outside Quotes

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If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.
Jack Welch
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
I revered the civil rights movement and appreciated the laws that granted us the right to ride buses, to sit at lunch counters, to cast ballots. But the slowness of real change fueled the riots’ intensity, from coast to coast. Decades later, inequality still ravaged poor and black communities. Then toss in the continued international struggle to end apartheid, the skyrocketing incarceration rates that scooped up too many of black folks’ cousins, and a youth poverty rate that defied the wealth of the era. I knew the truth behind their rage.
Stacey Abrams (Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change)
I suppose the attitude of the vast majority of people is 'Whats the hurry to do anything at all?' Most people have a job that gives them money and time off to enjoy it. Take the kids to the country, relax. Whats wrong with the way things are? I mean technology may have caused problems, but it's always solved them, hasn't it? We are healthier, and better off, and better dressed, and cleverer, and having more fun than anyone in history. And it's been good old inventive genius that's given us all this, so lets have more of the same. Tomorrow has always been better than today, so why should things suddenly be any different?... That's fine if your'e prepared to put up with a rate of change that makes today's breakneck pace look like a snail out for a walk. And a world more interdependent than it is now. and a level of specialization even more incomprehensible than it is now. And a growing avalanche of innovations each one competing with the other for the steadily shrinking amount of time there will be to make decisions about them. And a growing number of bureaucrats to process and handle those decisions. And outside this maelstrom, this core of decision making, way outside, cut off, the people who don't understand whats going on, and who wouldn't understand even if they got in to find out.
James Burke
I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow. What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those who minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black, fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of the birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleeper, and yet must needs call forth Sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Revitalized and healthy, I started dreaming new dreams. I saw ways that I could make a significant contribution by sharing what I’ve learned. I decided to refocus my legal practice on counseling and helping start-up companies avoid liability and protect their intellectual property. To share some of what I know, I started a blog, IP Law for Startups, where I teach basic lessons on trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents and give tips for avoiding the biggest blunders that destroy the value of intellectual assets. Few start-up companies, especially women-owned companies that rarely get venture capital funding, can afford the expensive hourly rates of a large law firm to the get the critical information they need. I feel deeply rewarded when I help a company create a strategy that protects the value of their company and supports their business dreams. Further, I had a dream to help young women see their career possibilities. In partnership with my sister, Julie Simmons, I created lookilulu.com, a website where women share their insights, career paths, and ways they have integrated motherhood with their professional pursuits. When my sister and I were growing up on a farm, we had a hard time seeing that women could have rewarding careers. With Lookilulu® we want to help young women see what we couldn’t see: that dreams are not linear—they take many twists and unexpected turns. As I’ve learned the hard way, dreams change and shift as life happens. I’ve learned the value of continuing to dream new dreams after other dreams are derailed. I’m sure I’ll have many more dreams in my future. I’ve learned to be open to new and unexpected opportunities. By way of postscript, Jill writes, “I didn’t grow up planning to be lawyer. As a girl growing up in a small rural town, I was afraid to dream. I loved science, but rather than pursuing medical school, I opted for low-paying laboratory jobs, planning to quit when I had children. But then I couldn’t have children. As I awakened to the possibility that dreaming was an inalienable right, even for me, I started law school when I was thirty; intellectual property combines my love of law and science.” As a young girl, Jill’s rightsizing involved mustering the courage to expand her dreams, to dream outside of her box. Once she had children, she again transformed her dreams. In many ways her dreams are bigger and aim to help more people than before the twists and turns in her life’s path.
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,
Sondra Barrett (Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence)
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. Welch says, “When the rate of change outside the company is greater than the rate of change inside, the end is near.
Michael Gale (The Digital Helix: Transforming Your Organization's DNA to Thrive in the Digital Age)
when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.
Jack Welch (Jack: Straight from the Gut)
A CHANGING SOCIETY What does today’s high incidence of social anxiety tell us about modern society? As we’ve seen, social anxiety is connected to a person’s drive for self-preservation and a feeling of safety. It is natural to withdraw from situations that we expect will lead to pain. Avoidance—while not necessarily healthy—is logical. Because the negative social experience of a growing number of people has caused them emotional pain and suffering, the number of individuals who choose to avoid socializing is increasing at an alarming rate. The sometimes wide distance among family members these days only adds to isolation. And the anonymity of large cities creates a vacuum in which many lonely people co-exist, often leading solitary lives in which they pursue their interests and activities alone. We live in a society in which social fears are perhaps not unjustified. As cities become denser, isolation seems to be the best way to counter urban decay. Consider the dangers of the outside world: Crime rates are soaring. Caution—and its companion, fear—are in the air. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves in a society where meeting people can be difficult. These larger forces can combine to create a further sense of distance among people. Particularly significant is the change that has taken place as the social organization of the smaller-scale community gives way to that of the larger, increasingly fragmented city. In a “hometown” setting, the character of daily life is largely composed of face-to-face relations with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. But in the hustle and bustle of today’s cities, whose urban sprawls extend to what author Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities—creating light industrial suburbs even larger than the cities they surround—the individual can get lost. It is common in these areas for people to focus solely on themselves, seldom getting to know their neighbors, and rarely living close to family. We may call these places home, but they are a far cry from the destination of that word as we knew it when we were children. Today’s cities are hotbeds of competition on all levels, from the professional to the social. It often seems as if only the most sophisticated “win.” To be ready for this constant challenge, you have to be able to manage in a stressful environment, relying on a whole repertoire of social skills just to stay afloat. This competitive environment can be terrifying for the socially anxious person. The 1980s were a consumer decade in which picture-perfect images on television and in magazines caused many of us to cast our lots with either the haves or the have-nots. Pressure to succeed grew to an all-time high. For those who felt they could not measure up, the challenge seemed daunting. I think the escalating crime rate in today’s urban centers—drugs, burglary, rape, and murder—ties into this trend and society’s response to the pressure. In looking at the forces that influence the social context of modern life, it is clear that feelings of frustration at not “making it” socially and financially are a component in many people’s choosing a life of crime. Interactive ability determines success in establishing a rewarding career, in experiencing relationships. Without these prospects, crime can appear to be a quick fix for a lifelong problem.
Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
Go outside. Frequently. Step outside anywhere and find a leaf and permit it to blow your mind. Check out its delta of veins. Run your finger on its underside. Taste it. Check if it has hair. Crumple it and smell it. Go further, to a forest of any size, a forest clearing, a clump of trees, or even a spot under a single specimen—someplace where, even though you may hear cars and dogs in the distance, you can sit on soft, uneven ground, unseen. Consider the unspooling ribbon of human affairs that the surrounding trees have witnessed and with what interest or indifference they may have watched. Inspect the ground and picture the interlaced fingers of mycelium and roots that swap sugar and water and carbon and data, a mushroom-assisted conversation that betrays care among trees. Notice the mosaic of leaves catching light or the weave of needles on the ground. Be still and birds will invade your copse. Trees, even in small groups, exhale monoterpenes that reduce stress, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and perhaps even trigger dopamine. So stay long enough to feel your mood change, watch shadows shorten or stretch. Get caught by rain or snow or nightfall. Get a little lost.
John W. Reid (Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet)
But various studies conducted since the early 1960s suggest that the James-Lange theory was not, after all, completely wrong. When researchers at Columbia gave study subjects an injection of adrenaline, the heart rate and breathing rate of all the subjects increased, and they all experienced an intensification of emotion—but the researchers could manipulate what emotion the subjects felt by changing the context. Those subjects given reason to feel positive emotions felt happy, while those given reason to feel negative emotions felt angry or anxious—and in every case they felt the respective emotion (whatever it happened to be) more powerfully than those subjects who had been given a placebo injection. The injection of adrenaline increased the intensity of emotion, but it did not determine what emotion that would be; the experimental context supplied that. This suggests that the autonomic systems of the body supply the mechanics of the emotion—but the mind’s interpretation of the outside environment supplies the valence.
Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of
Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
Modern culture treats sex outside of marriagea as being no big deal. It’s considered completely normal and not something to be ashamed of; if anything, people brag about it and argue that it’s a positive good. It’s described as being a “casual” activity; something you can do with “no strings attached.” You can supposedly have meaningless “hookups,” “one-night stands,” or text your “friends with benefits” to set up a “booty call,” which is probably the most unromantic thing I can even think of. This idea that sex outside of marriage is OK is probably the biggest lie we are told, and the biggest source of our problems—not just in dating, but in all of life. I know that is a bold statement, but consider the evidence: after the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, divorce rates doubled, followed by an ongoing decline in marriage rates.1 Currently, 40 percent of children in the United States are born out of wedlock, without a stable, married, two-parent family; in the 1960s, at the start of the sexual revolution, that number was just 7 percent.2 Besides those births, there have been 60 million US children killed before birth via abortion since 1973.3 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which would be almost nonexistent if all people were monogamous,b are instead at record highs,4 with something like 20 million new infections in the country each year.5 Pornography use has become so common that it’s just kind of assumed for men but is also regularly consumed by at least a third of all women.6 And then you have all the ways people use and abuse sex as a way to use and abuse other people through either harassment or assault, which is a huge problem: it’s estimated that one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,7 while the majority are either harassed or assaulted in some form.8 Go beyond the statistics and think about how all these things would affect the actual people involved, and all the various costs associated with each one. Add it all up, and the impact both on society and on individual relationships is ridiculously massive.
Jonathan (JP) Pokluda (Outdated: Find Love That Lasts When Dating Has Changed)
Relieving Stress Stress is your reaction to outside stimuli pushing your mind, body or spirit out of balance. Adapting to new stimuli is how you increase your capabilities and develop new skills, i.e., the basis of growth. But, if the stimuli is too great or arrives so quickly that you are unable to adapt, then the resulting stress can lead to physical, emotional or mental problems. Stress can be triggered by many factors, including: physical, emotional or mental abuse; life changing events such as a new job, moving, pregnancy or divorce; work or school-related deadlines; high stress occupations; and uncomfortable social situations Exposure to stress affects us in stages: In the first stage, when we experience stress, our bodies automatically react with the characteristic “fight or flight” response, also known as an adrenaline rush. In life threatening situations this is helpful, as adrenaline causes our bodies to increases our pulse, blood pressure and rate of breathing, better preparing us to do battle or to escape. When the outside stimuli disappear, often with a good night’s sleep, we return to normal. Continued exposure to stress, without a break, results in the second stage. In today’s modern society, everyday stress from traffic jams, work, or just plain living, triggers this same reaction. We end up in a constant state of stress. We deplete our reserves, especially our adrenal glands, and lessen our ability to handle additional stress. Even our ability to sleep can be affected. The final stage results from the accumulation of stress over time and leads to exhaustion. Unable to return our body, mind and spirit to its normal state of balance due to overwhelming stress, we suffer physical, emotional and mental breakdowns. Warning signs are: weight gain or loss, ulcers, indigestion, insomnia, depression, anxiety, fear, anger, inability to concentrate, moodiness, and other problems. It can be argued that all disease is a consequence of stress.
Edwin Harkness Spina (Escaping the Matrix: 8 Steps Beyond Stress and Anger Management For Attaining Inner Peace)
Identify items that seem likely to change. If the requirements have been done well, they include a list of potential changes and the likelihood of each change. In such a case, identifying the likely changes is easy. If the requirements don't cover potential changes, see the discussion that follows of areas that are likely to change on any project. Separate items that are likely to change. Compartmentalize each volatile component identified in step 1 into its own class or into a class with other volatile components that are likely to change at the same time. Isolate items that seem likely to change. Design the interclass interfaces to be insensitive to the potential changes. Design the interfaces so that changes are limited to the inside of the class and the outside remains unaffected. Any other class using the changed class should be unaware that the change has occurred. The class's interface should protect its secrets. Here are a few areas that are likely to change: Business rules. Business rules tend to be the source of frequent software changes. Congress changes the tax structure, a union renegotiates its contract, or an insurance company changes its rate tables. If you follow the principle of information hiding, logic based on these rules won't be strewn throughout your program. The logic will stay hidden in a single dark corner of the system until it needs to be changed.
Steve McConnell (Code Complete)
The reason is clear from the market share numbers. In the 1999 Euromoney poll, almost 48 per cent of market share was held by banks outside the top ten; by the 2006 poll, that number had halved to about 24 per cent. These banks did not have a business large enough to justify spending the money needed to automate. In fact, the collective market share decline of smaller banks masked a shift in behaviour that was even worse news for the career prospects of the traders who worked in them. Increasingly, FX giants like Deutsche would give these banks access to systems like Autobahn or the equivalent. Their salespeople would simply quote the Deutsche Bank (or Citibank, UBS or Barclays) rate to their customers with a small spread to offset the credit risk. No need for expensive traders. In effect, the smaller banks had shifted from ‘manufacturing’ FX rates to being distributors to clients with whom they had a strong relationship based on regional expertise or history. ‘You guys just sucked us dry,’ complained an old friend and adversary at the time – he was in his late thirties, from a smaller bank, and we were at his ‘leaving-the-industry’ drinks. ‘But,’ he added resignedly, with a slightly drunken grin, ‘I guess that’s just that old whore Capitalism for you.’ He became a maths teacher.
Kevin Rodgers (Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis)
America" Loans Interest rates Endless advertisements Usury and deception Countless heavy bodies filled with fear Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries… America Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills A political, media, and institutional matrix of power ran by one lobby… Credit cards Bankruptcy Debts Drugs The homeless Racism Weapons Strict security measures Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change under the pretext of the homeland security… America Sanctions imposed on this country and that, Internal psychological sanctions imposed on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free… America Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses, injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides and many other carcinogenic substances… America Houses that look beautiful from the outside, inhabited by people who are mostly lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns, or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria, the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them adapt to the psychological and spiritual death surrounding them from all sides… America Fruitless trees and scentless flowers, as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven upon those who stole the land from its native people, after erasing most of them… America Bills Sad letters in the mail, mostly from companies and advertisers wishing you a delightful day and great consumption, encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption, and reminding you that you may die abruptly of loneliness or the toxins that you consume, and therefore, you must seriously consider purchasing your casket and the plot under which you will be buried… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]
Louis Yako
Since governments have the ability to both make and borrow money, why couldn’t the central bank lend money at an interest rate of about 0 percent to the central government to distribute as it likes to support the economy? Couldn’t it also lend to others at low rates and allow those debtors to never pay it back? Normally debtors have to pay back the original amount borrowed (principal) plus interest in installments over a period of time. But the central bank has the power to set the interest rate at 0 percent and keep rolling over the debt so that the debtor never has to pay it back. That would be the equivalent of giving the debtors the money, but it wouldn’t look that way because the debt would still be accounted for as an asset that the central bank owns, so the central bank could still say it is performing its normal lending functions. This is the exact thing that happened in the wake of the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many versions of this have happened many times in history. Who pays? It is bad for those outside the central bank who still hold the debts as assets—cash and bonds—who won’t get returns that would preserve their purchasing power. The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
The freak-out over low Black marriage rates is connected to fears about the disappearance of Black families. And women, more so than men, are conditioned to be the keepers of family and culture. Black women viewed to be abdicating that responsibility are thought to be selling out in a way that men (who, when they date outside the race, get their own share of grief) are not. Hooking up with “the (White) man” is viewed as dancing with the Devil. And loving a non-Black man of color is reduced to perversion or fetish.
Tamara Winfrey Harris (The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America)
Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.
Bruce Gilley (King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.)
Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.
Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3))
So the base rate for the kind of transition entailed by a fast or medium takeoff scenario, in terms of the speed and magnitude of the postulated change, is zero: it lacks precedent outside myth and religion.
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
Best Ideas and Tips for Career Growth and Development In case you're thinking about how you will get where you need to be in your career, there are some basic advances you can take that will assist you in making your own professional development. Similarly, as with all endeavors, you should be clear about your course when you make your own career development plan. You don't take an excursion without knowing where you need to wind up. You additionally don't have to excessively confound this undertaking. For profession improvement wanting to be compelling, extend your perspective on advancement and that of your representatives. An outside instructional course isn't the best way to create workers. Worker advancement is an incredible idea yet it isn't without issues. The best plans save the duty regarding finish unequivocally on the shoulders of representatives. Something else, if a worker doesn't finish their advancement openings, the individual in question may decide to put the fault on the board, which is counter-profitable for the entirety of the included gatherings. Certain issues and articulations exist that you would need to maintain a strategic distance from as you and the workers who report to you make plans and strategies for career development. Best Ideas for Career Growth and Development 1. Analyze your skills by yourself Experience the expected set of responsibilities detail by detail and rate your present condition of aptitudes, training, or experience to what is recorded. Your rating framework can be as straightforward as 1-10, with 10 an ideal match and one being totally absent. As you rate, make notes about your manner of thinking for future reference. When you have finished this activity, distinguish the entirety of the things where there is anyplace from a decent measure to a considerable measure of improvement that is required. Search for shared characteristics and cluster those all together. You will find that there will be subjects for your holes. 2. Change Job If or Whenever You Want You may likewise need to have numerous methods of amplifying your range of abilities to add profundity to it. A model is in the event that you need to move to a venture the board position, you might need to get confirmation and furthermore request venture duties. At first, these might be little, which are fine; they will offer you a chance to develop and learn. Also, you may need to inquire about different approaches to get what it takes you have to develop in your profession. You can't anticipate to what extent or how much work you should do so as to build up the expertise at the level you need, however, you do have command over the move you make to begin. Follow along. You have to focus on your career development plan at least two times every year. This will permit you to remain concentrated on your advance and help you to remember subsequent stages. 3. Growth Takes Time: But not for Everyone Some portion of the explanation we presume development is such a high need when you search for an occupation is on the grounds that you weren't getting development and improvement at your last one. You can totally change occupations at regular intervals to fulfill your longing for development. In any case, that despite everything leaves an extensive timeframe when you're not developing once you sink into work and before you move onto the following one. Here are some of the plan and strategies for career development, if you have any doubt, let us know in the comment section. Can also check: Things which is Important for student to get success
Messar
Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table. I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing. He’d been here? My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder. I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up. The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.” My breath stilled in my lungs. What? He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He’d talked to them about in vitro and surrogacy, and he’d had fertility testing done. I put a shaky hand to my mouth, and tears began to blur my eyes. I pored over his test results. Josh was a breeding machine. Strong swimmers and an impressive sperm count. He’d circled this and put a winking smiley face next to it and I snorted. He’d outlined the clinic’s high success rates—higher than the national average—and he had gotten signed personal testimonials from previous patients, women like me who used a surrogate. Letter after letter of encouragement, addressed to me. The next page was a complete breakdown on the cost of in vitro and information on Josh’s health insurance and what it covered. His insurance was good. It covered the first round of IVF at 100 percent. He even had a small business plan. He proposed selling doghouses that he would build. The extra income would raise enough money for the second round of in vitro in about three months. The next section was filled with printouts from the Department of International Adoptions. Notes scrawled in Josh’s handwriting said Brazil just opened up. He broke down the process, timeline, and costs right down to travel expenses and court fees. I flipped past a sleeve full of brochures to a page on getting licensed for foster care. He’d already gone through the background check, and he enclosed a form for me, along with a series of available dates for foster care orientation classes and in-home inspections. Was this what he’d been doing? This must have taken him weeks. My chin quivered. Somehow, seeing it all down on paper, knowing we’d be in it together, it didn’t feel so hopeless. It felt like something that we could do. Something that might actually work. Something possible. The last page had an envelope taped to it. I pried it open with trembling hands, my throat getting tight. I know what the journey will look like, Kristen. I’m ready to take this on. I love you and I can’t wait to tell you the best part…Just say okay. I dropped the letter and put my face into my hands and sobbed like I’d never sobbed in my life. He’d done all this for me. Josh looked infertility dead in the eye, and his choice was still me. He never gave up. All this time, no matter how hard I rejected him or how difficult I made it, he never walked away from me. He just changed strategies. And I knew if this one didn’t work he’d try another. And another. And another. He’d never stop trying until I gave in. And Sloan—she knew. She knew this was here, waiting for me. That’s why she’d made me leave. They’d conspired to do this.
Abby Jimenez
Motherhood is significant for yet another reason. Over the past twenty-five years, I have learned that not only does God use motherhood to change our children, but He also uses it to change us. I once read about a bumper sticker that said, “My children saved me from toxic self-absorption,” 32 and I laughed—and simultaneously thanked God. We live in a culture that constantly pushes us toward narcissism—and frankly, that’s precisely what the emphasis on pursuing our passions does too. But motherhood, unlike anything else I know, has the power to pull us outside of ourselves. It’s one of the only situations where we’re capable of loving someone more than we love ourselves, and we practice a level of servanthood that we would otherwise find impossible. Motherhood allows us to grow at an exponential rate and to be molded into Christ’s image. So much of who I am today, which enables me to do the ministry I do, was developed in the crucible of motherhood.
Julie Roys (Redeeming the Feminine Soul: God's Surprising Vision for Womanhood)
The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate. To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons—with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society—were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, “our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.” And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: “what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed.” During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era. Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders—proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground—may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at “outsiders,” “others,” or “people of color” as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.
Roy Beck
In short, distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are tracking targets that move too fast for genetic evolution. In a stable phase, “as­ similative alleles”—genes that reduce the experience­dependence of a cognitive gadget’s development—may increase in frequency. But when the environment shifts, there will be selection against assimi­lative alleles because their bearers will be slower to adjust to the new conditions (Chater et al., 2009). Once again, let’s take imitation as an example. As long as gestural markers of group membership, bonding rituals, and technologies remain constant, alleles that privilege and accelerate learning of particular matching vertical associations could be targets of positive selection. For example, people who more readily associate matching trunk movements (for example, you lean forward, I lean forward) than complementary trunk movements (you lean forward, I lean back), might have higher reproductive fitness than people who learn matching and complementary trunk movements at the same rate. But when conventions or technologies change, those assimilative alleles would hamper the development of imitation mechanisms with a now more effective repertoire of matching vertical associations. The people who had once been such effective social op­erators would now be losing social capital by leaning in when they should be leaning back. This kind of problem could be avoided if mu­tation produced a universal imitation mechanism, like the cognitive instinct postulated by Meltzof and Moore (1997), which could copy the topography of any body movement. However, this would be stan­dard genetic evolution, not genetic assimilation, and, given that no one has worked out how such a mechanism could operate (Chapter 6), it is plausible that—like wheels (Dennett, 1984)—it lies outside the range of available genetic variation.
Cecilia Heyes (Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking)
Endometriosis, or painful periods? (Endometriosis is when pieces of the uterine lining grow outside of the uterine cavity, such as on the ovaries or bowel, and cause painful periods.) Mood swings, PMS, depression, or just irritability? Weepiness, sometimes over the most ridiculous things? Mini breakdowns? Anxiety? Migraines or other headaches? Insomnia? Brain fog? A red flush on your face (or a diagnosis of rosacea)? Gallbladder problems (or removal)? — PART E — Poor memory (you walk into a room to do something, then wonder what it was, or draw a blank midsentence)? Emotional fragility, especially compared with how you felt ten years ago? Depression, perhaps with anxiety or lethargy (or, more commonly, dysthymia: low-grade depression that lasts more than two weeks)? Wrinkles (your favorite skin cream no longer works miracles)? Night sweats or hot flashes? Trouble sleeping, waking up in the middle of the night? A leaky or overactive bladder? Bladder infections? Droopy breasts, or breasts lessening in volume? Sun damage more obvious, even glaring, on your chest, face, and shoulders? Achy joints (you feel positively geriatric at times)? Recent injuries, particularly to wrists, shoulders, lower back, or knees? Loss of interest in exercise? Bone loss? Vaginal dryness, irritation, or loss of feeling (as if there were layers of blankets between you and the now-elusive toe-curling orgasm)? Lack of juiciness elsewhere (dry eyes, dry skin, dry clitoris)? Low libido (it’s been dwindling for a while, and now you realize it’s half or less than what it used to be)? Painful sex? — PART F — Excess hair on your face, chest, or arms? Acne? Greasy skin and/or hair? Thinning head hair (which makes you question the justice of it all if you’re also experiencing excess hair growth elsewhere)? Discoloration of your armpits (darker and thicker than your normal skin)? Skin tags, especially on your neck and upper torso? (Skin tags are small, flesh-colored growths on the skin surface, usually a few millimeters in size, and smooth. They are usually noncancerous and develop from friction, such as around bra straps. They do not change or grow over time.) Hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia and/or unstable blood sugar? Reactivity and/or irritability, or excessively aggressive or authoritarian episodes (also known as ’roid rage)? Depression? Anxiety? Menstrual cycles occurring more than every thirty-five days? Ovarian cysts? Midcycle pain? Infertility? Or subfertility? Polycystic ovary syndrome? — PART G — Hair loss, including of the outer third of your eyebrows and/or eyelashes? Dry skin? Dry, strawlike hair that tangles easily? Thin, brittle fingernails? Fluid retention or swollen ankles? An additional few pounds, or 20, that you just can’t lose? High cholesterol? Bowel movements less often than once a day, or you feel you don’t completely evacuate? Recurrent headaches? Decreased sweating? Muscle or joint aches or poor muscle tone (you became an old lady overnight)? Tingling in your hands or feet? Cold hands and feet? Cold intolerance? Heat intolerance? A sensitivity to cold (you shiver more easily than others and are always wearing layers)? Slow speech, perhaps with a hoarse or halting voice? A slow heart rate, or bradycardia (fewer than 60 beats per minute, and not because you’re an elite athlete)? Lethargy (you feel like you’re moving through molasses)? Fatigue, particularly in the morning? Slow brain, slow thoughts? Difficulty concentrating? Sluggish reflexes, diminished reaction time, even a bit of apathy? Low sex drive, and you’re not sure why? Depression or moodiness (the world is not as rosy as it used to be)? A prescription for the latest antidepressant but you’re still not feeling like yourself? Heavy periods or other menstrual problems? Infertility or miscarriage? Preterm birth? An enlarged thyroid/goiter? Difficulty swallowing? Enlarged tongue? A family history of thyroid problems?
Sara Gottfried (The Hormone Cure)